Stage gates: steer your projects gate by gate

Many projects move forward through formal decision points: feasibility, design freeze, release, start of production. Until now these decisions lived in meeting minutes. FoxPlan now brings them into the schedule itself, with stage gates.

The workspace administrator defines groups of gates — for example Feasibility, Design freeze, Release, Start of production — and each project is attached to a group. A gate is carried by a milestone of the plan: the project manager approves or rejects it, naming the decision-maker (a person or a body such as the steering committee), the decision date and a comment, mandatory for a rejection. Gates are passed in order: a gate can only be approved once the previous one is. An approval made by mistake can be reopened without erasing anything.

Every decision stays in a tamper-proof history, with who recorded it and when. A Stage gate tab in the project definition lists each gate with its status, milestone, planned date and approval date; a matrix block in the project and portfolio dashboards shows the state of every gate across projects; and a Stage gate column in the portfolio views shows the last gate each project has passed. The feature is enabled workspace by workspace.