The EVa Project 

Introduction to Stage Gates

At any time, organisations have several projects in their R&D portfolio.  

​

The job of the senior management team is make decisions the “right” decisions about the portfolio: allocate the right resources (people, tools, and budgets) to the right projects at the right time.  

​

To do this management teams use portfolio management processes. Stage-Gates (Cooper, 2008) are one such approach, widely used for R&D projects.  

​

The objective of stage-gates is to minimize uncertainty by identifying ‘‘wrong’’ projects at various stages before too many resources are invested in them. This means developing a map for moving R&D projects from idea to launch and beyond.  

As the graph shows, the map has a set of stages for executing activities. Each stage is followed by a gate. Depending on progress, at the prior stage(s), a ‘go/no-go decision is made on whether to continue with the project (Cooper, 2008).