What are project stages?

 Project stages are used to manage a project’s internal lifecycle. If your company’s projects each go through the established process or administrative processes, you can use the project stages to indicate where the project is in the process.

Project stages differ from project status by where the project stages represent the internal treatment of the project, the project status reflects progress in relation to the customer’s order, and is used to manage easily when time can be registered. A project, can, for example, have the project status of Completed, thus indicating that the delivery has occurred, while several project stages can still be missing (such as invoicing and final evaluation) before the administrative work is completed.

Project stages can also be used to get an overview of the resources allocated and the resource needs for projects that are in consideration to be started.

Example: A company uses the following stages: Idea, Planning, Ready for execution, Execution, Delivered, and Completed. Projects that have not yet started, but which you are considering starting, are added to the Idea stage. Projects where work has started but is not yet finished are placed in the Execution stage. When they are finished, they change to Delivered, and when the invoicing and final evaluation has occurred, the stage is changed to Completed.

Once the company has available resources, the Project portfolio report is used to create a list of projects in the idea stage. This gives you an overview of the budgets of the projects that can be started, and can assess which projects are consistent with the available resources. Similarly, one can easily create a list of projects that have been marked as delivered, and therefore should be invoiced and have a final evaluation.