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For rapid product development, many companies incorporate a method called Stage-Gate®, which allows new products to be taken from concept to launch with assessment and approvals at each stage. The journey through the roadmap goes from Discovery, Scoping, Building a Business Case, Development, Testing and Validation, and Launch including a Post-Launch Review. Between each Stage is a Gate where deliverables are evaluated and, at these Gates, the project is given a decision of go/kill/hold/recycle. If the project moves forward, an approved project plan, date and deliverables are given and the next Gate proceeds.
A phase-gate process (also referred to as a stage-gate process or waterfall process) is a project management technique in which an initiative or project (e.g., new product development, software development, process improvement, business change) is divided into distinct stages or phases, separated by decision points (known as gates).
All of this information inside Salesforce allows the Project Team to take full advantage of standard platform functionality for collaboration, planning, and reporting. Milestones PM+ is a 100% Salesforce-native project management app that can easily be used for this methodology on any Salesforce cloud.
Using Stage-Gate® in a Milestones PM+ Project, each Stage would have a Milestone with associated Tasks for each department (R&D, sales, marketing, etc.) assigned to the appropriate Resource. After these departmental Tasks are marked complete, a final Task representing the Gate would evaluate the Stage; this could include an Approval Process that the Project Team must green-light before continuing.
Optionally, to fully incorporate the methodology, modify the Object labels to have Stages instead of Milstones and Deliverables in place of Tasks.
DOWNLOAD: Stage-Gate® Project Starter Template for Milestones PM+
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