Stage-Gate Model
Good Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a key to success in New Product Development. A way to achieve this it is by implement the Stage-Gate Model to help make better decisions when dealing with portfolio management. Stage-Gate was developed by Robert G. Cooper in the 1980´s. The model works as a structured method for product innovation, program or project, bringing ideas from concept to launch. Stage-Gate consists of five different stages:
- Scope
- Building Business Case
- Development
- Testing & Validation
- Launch
Stages can be seen as a set of activities. Every stage consist of different activities that must be completed in order to move further to the next stage. The project team preforming these activities consists of workforce from different departments so that they can be done in parallel with each other. Working together in a cross-functional team will also contribute to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
Between each of these stages there are gates. Gates works as “decision points” or milestones, where the deliverables is brought up for quality control. This is most likely to be done by the top management or a decision-making team. When evaluating the deliverables they can either decide if the project should go forward, stop, hold or redo the current stage. Dealing with risk and uncertainty is often one of many pitfalls in projects. Stage-Gate take this in to account, as the risk and uncertainty will decrease the longer out in the process the projects evolves. The is because the gatekeepers are evaluating the deliverables from every stage, and if they are not satisfied they can kill the project. This is one of the benefits of the Stage-Gate process, which in the long run will assure that the company uses their resources at the right place.
The intention of this article is to share light on using Stage-Gate Model in Portfolio Management, describing the process and explain which criteria that must be fulfilled in order to achieve success. Further, a walkthrough of the application is given, showing which activities that must be performed in the stages. To sum up this article, strengths and weaknesses will be discussed.
Introduction
It is well known that many of the world’s biggest firm benefits from using the Stage-Gate when dealing with idea conceptualization and bringing new products to marketCite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag
References
- ↑ G. Cooper, Robert, The seven principles of the latest Stage-Gate method add up to a streamlined, new-product idea-to-launch process., https://www.stage-gate.net/downloads/working_papers/wp_23.pdf, March, 2006
- ↑ G. Cooper, Robert, Best Practices in the Idea-to-Launch - Process and Its Governance , Research Technology Management, April, 2012
- ↑ Hjeltnes, Tor Atle, Fasemodell for produktutvikling., https://www.ntnu.no/iie/fag/mop/Modul%202/mop-ls2-fasemodell-2014v.pdf, 2014
- ↑ https://www.stage-gate.com/resources_stage-gate_full.php., The official site of Stage-Gate, Last visited 29-09-2014
