Manage and Vote on Gates Overview

If a project uses a gated model, the project contains one or more gates, which are points in the process where decisions are made about whether to continue to the next phase of a project. The project team assembles the deliverables from the stage leading up to the gate and those who are responsible for making the decision use the information to decide whether to continue the project, put the project on hold, gather more information prior to making a decision, or to cancel work on the project.

Gate Participants

Gates and the events leading up to a gate meeting include the following project team members:

  • Gate Owner - Gate owners schedule gate meetings including the appropriate gatekeepers, and ensure that all the deliverables and gate documents are ready prior to the gate meeting. For gates they own, gate owners can modify gate details, modify gate documents, change gatekeepers, and enter gate decisions.

The Process Manager with Manage Process rights assigns the gate owners for each gate at the project level. The model can also contain a default gate owner. A gate owner can be any of the following:

  • A user assigned the Gate Manager user role.
  • A user assigned the Process Manager user role with Manage Process rights at the access group level.
  • Gatekeeper - During gate meetings, gatekeepers make decisions for their functional area about whether the project is ready to move on to the next stage. The functional areas that apply to each gate are assigned in the process model. The process model can also contain users assigned to each function that populate in each project that uses the model.

The gate owner for a gate can change the gatekeepers for gates that they own or choose to not include a gatekeeper in a particular gate meeting. Gatekeepers must be assigned the Executive user role.

Gate Decisions

Gate decisions can be captured in the following ways:

  • Manually with no voting options - The gate owner enters the gate decision to advance the project to the next gate.
  • With gatekeeper voting - Gatekeepers enter an approval or rejection decision for a pending gate decision. Within the process model, gatekeeper voting can be set to skip a gatekeeper, for example, if they are absent or are not required for a particular project, and set to move a project to the next stage if a unanimous Go or Conditional Go decision is made.
  • Automatically using metric conditions - Gate decisions can be set automatically based on metric conditions defined in the process model for a gate, or metrics conditions defined in an automated step in a workflow that is part of the stage before a gate.

See the following to get started: