What Are the Five Stages of a Project Plan?

Properly planning a project can help you solve problems.

Businesses are constantly faced with problems involving products that develop unintended problems or underperform in the market. Software developers are no stranger to this situation; a software program released too early can very quickly tarnish the company's name with consumers. To fix these problems, companies will assemble project teams to try to solve the problem. These teams use a five-step process to do that.

Identification of the Problem

The first step in project planning is identifying the problem. In this example, your new software program is underperforming sales-wise and is getting a lot of negative publicity. Interviews with management, staff, retailers and customers can give you more information about what exactly the problem is.

Planning

In the planning stage, the project team will come up with ideas on how to solve the problem, along with cost estimates, deadlines and target goals for the end result. In this case, after receiving feedback from the people you interviewed, you learn that bugs in the software code cause the program to crash and that it's a slow-running program.

Implementation

During the implementation phase, the plans to solve the problem that you came up with in Step 2 will be enacted. The patches for the software will be written and tested prior to being released to the public, and a new ad campaign will be launched to try to boost sales and rehab the product's image.

Evaluation and Live Operations

During this stage, the response to the problem that the project team came up with is monitored, with support provided to customers. You will also do an analysis of the entire process to this point, evaluating how the project team responded to the problem, including whether or not they were able to complete the project on-time and on- or under-budget.

Future Planning

The final step is future planning. In this step, you'll determine if the project needs to be continued or if it can be ended, if a project needs to be developed to succeed this project, and if this project needs to be re-evaluated at a point in time in the future or at regular intervals.

References

• The Project Management Hut: Project Management Stages
• Second Foundation: Project Methodology (PDF)
• Cardiff University: Project Stages