Chief Product Team 
Have you ever heard about project management phases? What are they? Keep your interest, since this is the focus of this article. Let’s find out.
What Is Project Management?
Project management is a process of planning, organizing, and leading a team (people) to achieve certain objectives through completing a project. It is an organized way of performing the work through the activities, tasks, and other elements within the boundaries of the project plan.
Project management involves managing all aspects of the project, even if you have an internal IT department or not. It is an approach to achieve the planned outcomes within a specific time and cost limit. It is sometimes also referred to as management of project work.
Project Management Phases
The phases of project management include planning, initiating, executing, monitoring & controlling, closing, and post-closing. Let us have short details about each phase.
1. Planning Phase
Planning is an important phase of the project. This phase aims to identify, analyze and plan a project. This phase involves planning for all activities, costs, resources, and constraints. In this phase, you will also define the project objectives and create an implementation plan for each objective.
2. Initiating Phase
Initiating is the next phase of project management. In this phase, you need to provide the project team with all resources, equipment, and other materials, so that they can start working. This phase also includes communication between the stakeholders and the project team. The main task of this phase is to formally initiate a project.
3. Executing Phase
Executing is mandatory for the successful completion of any project. In this phase, you need to perform all activities, tasks, and other elements as per the plan. Here, you will also ensure that all activities are performed according to the time frame, cost, and resource requirements. This is the phase where you will work on the project tasks. You will also monitor the resources and make sure that they are used by the plan.
4. Monitoring & Controlling Phase
Monitoring & controlling is another important phase of project management. The main aim of this phase is to carefully monitor all aspects of the project and make sure that it is going as per plan or not. It also involves measuring performance against the plan (whether it is on track or not). If there are any deviations from the plan, then corrective actions need to be taken immediately to bring the project back on track again. These corrective actions include change requests from stakeholders and retooling activities by the team members if required.
5. Closing Phase
Closing is an important phase of project management where you will terminate the resources for a specific period after the achievement of a specific deliverable or milestone within a certain period/budget limit. When this happens, you can also call it closing a specific project stage (it depends upon how many stages are present in your project).
6. Post-Closing Phase
Post-Closing is another important phase of project management where you will do some final cleanup work like archiving your data, documents & information related to that specific stage/deliverable, etc… It takes care of last-minute tasks after closing one stage and before starting another one (if any).
