How to Set up Stage Gates in the Project Plan

This video is for PMs to set up an Approval process throughout the Project Plan before users can move to the next stage of the task list.

Transcript:

This video is for teams who are using stage gates or want to start using stage gates. Before moving on to the next section of a project, as you can see here, we have a set of tasks that are happening before the all-site supervision section of the project starts. Our stage gate task for this example will be a meeting that needs to be approved by me, the project manager, before the all-site supervision section can begin. Since we want this meeting to be the last task before all-site supervision, we will make it a successor task to install equipment. Just right-click on "Install Equipment," select "Insert Task," and insert "Task Accessor." Let's name it "Review Meeting" and hit enter. Let's edit again and set the time span for this meeting to take place to be two days, giving it a two-hour duration. Select a resource; I'll choose Adam Tumap and hit enter again. Now, the task is in the system, but it still needs approval before it can be used as a stage gate. To do this, we'll go into the details for the task, click "Add," and then click "Approval." We'll set the approver as myself, Jack Stall, and everything else can be left blank. The only important thing is that we uncheck the "Activate and Send Approval" option, as we only want the approval sent by Adam when he's done with the meeting. Now, when he is done with the meeting and ready to send the approval, he'll go back into the approval and start it, which will send it to me for approval. Back on the task list, I'll show you an easy way to see which tasks are stage gates. You'll want to right-click the name of any column, click "Insert," search for "Approval," select that, and click "Insert." You can see our approval status beside our Review Meeting task. Its status is not active, as Adam has not yet sent it to us. Let's pretend we're Adam and go back into the approval. He would change the description to explain the results of the meeting and click "Start" to send me the approval for review. Now, the approval status is pending. As a project manager, you can see this from the task itself on the task list, assuming you have that approval column we created. You should also get a notification, and you'll be able to see it from your home screen. Now that we're on the approvals menu, we can click the Review Meeting approval. The "Approve/Deny" button will be available, and we can click "Approve." Going back to the task once more, we can see that the task is labeled as approved, and you'll also note that because of the approval, the work status on the task has been set to "Done."