Owais Mughal
July 17, 2020
Has it ever happened to you that you were trying to schedule a phase gate meeting on your project but all decision makers’ calendars were too busy for next 3 weeks? Sound familiar? It happens more than often and becomes a common bottleneck in Phase Gate/Waterfall Project Management methodology. It happens because the leadership is usually busy and is difficult to get them in a meeting at a short notice.
Now look at another scenario where a portfolio may have 20 medium size projects. If every project needs 5 to 7 phase gates then we will be arranging anywhere from 100 to 140 gate meetings in a year. That is roughly one gate meeting every 3rd day. That is too much overhead on running the phase gate process smoothly and a sure way to make people start avoiding the process altogether.
In the following, I have put together few tips from my own experience on how to effectively schedule Phase Gate Meetings
(1) Reduced Number of Gates: You can reduce the number of gates on simpler projects down to 3 or 2. This should be decided based on project ‘complexity’ and endorsed by the decision committee to remove the biases of project team and project manager.
(2) Asynchronous Virtual Gates: Instead of waiting for decision maker’s calendars to free up, gate material could be sent to them and they can vote their decision via email/web. The downside here could be that live discussion between decision makers could not happen before the vote is taken.
I had posted this article first on LinkedIn and there a friend of mine Mr. Silvestro Russo suggested that Asynchronous gates could also be held using a recorded video session. I really liked this idea because a video recorded gate presentation could be more effective than a passive set of power point slides.
(3) Electronic Gates: This is where gate meetings could be arranged using video conferencing services e.g. Webex, Zoom, Skype etc.
(4) Team Gates: This is a bold concept where project team are empowered to decided on their own projects. This requires a high level of trust between project teams and leadership. It works out well in companies where this trust exists.
(5) Group Gates: In this solution, you can group together projects that are due for a gate meeting in a given fortnight or a month and then arrange a group gate decision meeting. It is usually easier to get hold of leadership in a monthly recurring gate decision meeting than a one-off meeting which may happen very frequently.
(6) Delayed Gates: Yet another solution could be to allow teams to proceed to next phase without a gate if the team finds it difficult to arrange one in a reasonable time. The advantage is that project team does not stop work and risk dispersal of resources. The risk is that when the actual gate meeting takes place and if the decision makers ‘kill’ the project or send it back for more work then we risk losing the effort done in interim. This risk could be worth taking in most of the projects – especially if the gates could be arranged within a week or two of scheduled date.
(7) Proxy attendee Gates: One more option could be that decision makers name their proxies who could attend the phase gate meeting and vote on their behalf. These proxies should be knowledgeable enough on the product and process and should have enough authority to be an effective decision maker.
Let me know readers, if you know of or could think any other ways of effectively scheduling Phase Gate Meetings.
Projects and Products 