Stage Gates Revisited: Gate Meetings

The PM Hut (specifically, Dave Nielsen) published an article last week that I feel deserves some special attention. The article can be found here: Conducting Successful Gate Meetings

My comments (visible on the article) have been re-published below:

Dave,

Sorry it took a week for me to approve your comment (I never realize comment moderation was on at my blog). I'm glad you pointed this article out to me - specifically because it made me realize a couple of additional points with regards to stage gates.

Primarily, the gate meetings themselves - why they should be held, and when they should be held during your projects.

The parts dealing with who should attend and how to run the meetings are more political in nature and I feel are different/unique per situation.

> Gate meetings also serve the purpose of validating the Business Case. As the project’s scope, budget, and schedule change throughout its life cycle, your Business Case will change.

Hadn't considered this aspect. I realize that the project evolves, the customers evolve and the business relationship evolves, so we would have to update documentation, but I hadn't considered the need to update the business case for the project. We usually work with technical writers and they take care of this for us - but it's definately something an independant consultant or small team should take into account.

> The Business Case may also be changed by circumstances outside the span of your control such as changes in the market place. The Gate Meeting is your opportunity to have the updated Business Case validated by your project’s executive sponsors.

Yes, another great effect of updating your business case would be its re-validation against the market.

> The second [gate meeting] is critical because this is the meeting where the customer will formally accept the products of the project. It should drive any formal sign offs and final payments that conclude the project.

I've always preached and practiced holding what I now call gate meetings many times over the development cycle of a project, but I don't think I've ever held one before customer sign-off. We had small reviews to ensure whether or not all of the features had been fully completed and tested out, but never to evaluate whether the business case still stood, whether or not to cut the project off or restructure it, etc. I'll have to try it out and see if the sponsors / clients would be interested in changes from what we had originally considered the "final release." I think mostly because since we follow the Stage Gate process, we feel that things are aligned towards a successful completion assuming all coding and functionality are completed for the fully evolved project. But always room to try and it costs no more than a day of work.

The article also goes into the fine points of actually conducting the meetings, deciding who should attend, etc. These are the details that I feel deserve a look at, even though I consider most of these points unique to the situation within a company, because they form good, general advice.

Take care,
Ahad L. Amdani