The final piece of terminology or jargon to understand we're looking at the life cycle is the boundaries between stages. The Communist name for these boundaries in the UK, where I come from is gateways. In the US, they're more commonly known as stage gates or just gates. You may also hear them referred to as boundary gates, or a number of other things. Whatever terminology you hear, almost certainly is built upon the same basic metaphor, the metaphor of a gate, you have a boundary between two stages. And the gate is what you have to pass through in order to move from one state to the other.

And of course, you That means that the Stage Gate or the gateway is your fundamental unit of project governance during the lifecycle. This is where the project is controlled, where decisions are made, particularly go no go decisions and criteria upon which the project is allowed to proceed. Project gateways are therefore fundamental to the good governance and the good control of your project. And as a project manager, therefore, your role is to determine not so much what stages you need, but what gateways you need to properly control your project to make it clearly accountable to make its processes transparent. So, now you have the core terminology and the core concepts you need to understand the project of your structure as we work through the four key stages of our project and understand all the tools and techniques You need to do that and to manage your project in a practical and effective way.