By Sanjay Omkar · 21 August 2025 · 8 min read
Phase 1: Initiation
Initiation establishes whether the project should exist. It produces a business case, identifies stakeholders, defines the high-level objective and secures approval. Projects that skip this phase tend to be cancelled later at far greater cost, because nobody agreed at the start what success looked like.
Phase 2: Planning
Planning converts an objective into a schedule, a budget and a scope document. Deliverables are broken into a work breakdown structure, dependencies are mapped, resources are assigned and risks are logged with mitigation owners.
In web and software projects this is where wireframes, technical specifications and acceptance criteria belong. Ambiguity that survives planning becomes an argument during execution.
Phase 3: Execution
Execution is where the deliverables are actually produced. The project manager's role shifts to coordination, unblocking, quality control and communication. Regular stand-ups and a visible task board keep everybody aligned on what is in progress and what is stuck.
Phase 4: Monitoring and controlling
This phase runs in parallel with execution rather than after it. Scope, schedule, cost and quality are measured against the plan, change requests are assessed formally, and variance is corrected early while correction is still cheap.
- Track schedule and cost variance weekly, not monthly.
- Log every change request with its impact on time and budget.
- Keep a live risk register with named owners.
- Report status in the same format every time so trends are visible.
Phase 5: Closure
Closure means formal acceptance, handover of documentation and credentials, release of resources, final invoicing and a retrospective. The retrospective is the phase most often skipped and the one that improves every future project, capture what worked, what failed and what the team would do differently.
