Stage Gate Software: Phase Gate Process Tools for PMOs
Five gates from idea to benefits review, with an Excel review pack built per initiative. The pack carries the score, the business case figures and the capacity demand exactly as they stood on the day of the review, and it does not change afterwards.
Plans from $24.50 a month billed yearly, or $49 monthly. The demo opens on signup with a worked portfolio and one stage gate pack you can download.
Stage gate software runs the decision points between project phases: it holds which gate each initiative sits at, assembles the evidence that gate needs, and records what was decided and by whom. Portfolio Hub does that with five fixed gates and a downloadable Excel pack per review. The pack is a snapshot, not a live view, so the numbers a sponsor approved in March still read the same in September even though the initiative record has moved on. Phase gate and stage gate name the same model, and the tool answers to both.
Five gates, and the one question each of them settles
A gate is worth holding only if it can stop something. These five are the points in a portfolio where stopping is still cheap enough to be a real option, which is why the workspace ships them fixed rather than asking you to design a workflow first.
| Gate | The question on the table | What has to be in the pack | Cost of stopping here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gate 0 Idea to candidate | Is this worth the effort of assessing properly? | A named sponsor, the problem it addresses, a rough size | A few hours of someone's time |
| Gate 1 Business case approved | Do the benefits justify the cost, on the numbers as we understand them? | Benefit and cost estimates, the benefit to cost ratio, the score | The cost of writing the case, typically days |
| Gate 2 Funded and staffed | Is the capacity it needs actually available, in the months it needs it? | FTE demand, delivery role, start and end dates, rank in the portfolio | Nothing has been spent on delivery yet. This is the last cheap exit |
| Gate 3 Delivery checkpoint | Has anything changed enough that we would not approve it again today? | Current status, the score rebuilt, what moved since Gate 2 | Sunk delivery cost, which is why most portfolios skip this gate |
| Gate 4 Benefits review | Did the benefits arrive, and what does that tell us about the next case? | Benefit claimed at Gate 1 against benefit measured | Nothing stops here. This gate exists to correct the next Gate 1 |
Gate 3 is the one PMOs quietly drop, because by then the money is spent and stopping feels like admitting a mistake. It is also the only gate that catches an initiative whose justification evaporated after funding. The stage gate process guide works through the phases in more depth, and how to cancel a project cleanly covers what happens when a gate says stop.
The review pack is three sheets, and it is built from the live record
Press build on an initiative, pick the gate, and the workspace writes an Excel file named for the gate and the initiative. It pulls everything from the record as it stands at that moment, then stores that copy against the pack. Editing the initiative afterwards does not touch a pack that has already been built.
That is the whole design argument. A gate pack is a meeting document. If it re-renders from live data every time someone opens it, the portfolio loses the ability to answer the only question an auditor, a new sponsor or an angry finance director ever asks about a gate: what did the board actually see when it said yes?
The third sheet ships with the decision questions already written and the answers blank, because the pack is meant to be filled in during the meeting rather than typed up afterwards from memory.
| Sheet | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Gate pack | Gate, initiative, sponsor, business unit, stage and delivery status at review, who prepared it and when. Then portfolio score, rank at review, annual benefit, cost estimate, benefit to cost ratio, delivery role, FTE demand, and the dates it runs between |
| Scoring | Every criterion with its weight, the 1 to 5 rating given, and the points that rating contributed, down to the total. Risk is marked lower is better, so nobody reads an inverted criterion the wrong way round |
| Gate decision | Four standing questions, then the decision itself, who decided and the date, plus any notes carried in from the register |
Every gate asks the same four things, printed on the sheet
Gate meetings drift into status reporting because nobody wrote down what the meeting is for. These four are on the decision sheet of every pack, at every gate, with the answer column empty.
Does this still fit the strategy we funded it against?
Strategies move faster than portfolios. An initiative approved against a priority that has since been retired is the most common thing a gate should catch and usually does not.
Has the business case changed since the last gate?
Not whether it has slipped, but whether the benefit and cost figures still hold. A case that has quietly doubled in cost needs re-approving, not reporting.
Is the capacity it needs actually available?
The question that turns a gate from a formality into a real control, because the honest answer is often no and the portfolio has been pretending otherwise.
What stops if this continues?
Continuing is a decision to spend capacity that something else needs. Naming the something else is what makes a gate a portfolio decision rather than a project one.
From an initiative record to a signed gate decision in four steps
- Load the initiative and score it. Name, sponsor, business unit, stage, the delivery role, FTE demand and dates, plus a 1 to 5 rating on strategic fit, value, urgency, confidence and risk. The score and the portfolio rank fall out of that.
- Set the gate it is coming to. Gate 0 through Gate 4. The gate decides which numbers matter most in the review, not which fields exist.
- Build the pack before the meeting, not after. The file is written from the record as it stands and frozen at that moment, so the version you circulate on Monday is the version discussed on Thursday.
- Fill the decision sheet in the room. Continue, pause or stop, who decided, the date. Update the initiative afterwards. The pack keeps the before picture, the record carries the after.
Template, workspace, or a configurable PPM platform
Gate governance gets bought at three very different price points, and the usual mistake is jumping from the first straight to the third. The middle option exists because most PMOs need a fixed process running well, not a configurable one running late.
| Capability | Gate review template | Portfolio Hub workspace | PPM platform with gate workflow |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gate model | Whatever the author drew | Five fixed gates, idea to benefits | Configurable per portfolio, per business unit |
| Where the numbers come from | Retyped from other files | The initiative record, automatically | The platform, automatically |
| Record of what the board saw | Whichever file was attached to the invite | A frozen snapshot per pack | Versioned, with an audit trail |
| Approval routing and sign-off | Recorded on the decision sheet, not routed | Workflow with roles and electronic approval | |
| Link to score and capacity | A different spreadsheet | Same record as the score and the capacity plan | Yes, with scenario modeling |
| Time to the first real gate | An afternoon | Under an hour | Three to twelve months of implementation |
| Right fit | Under 10 initiatives, one reviewer | 10 to a few hundred initiatives, a fixed process you want followed | Regulated gate approval, multiple gate models, electronic sign-off |
If your gates need routed electronic approval with named approvers and a legal audit trail, you need a platform, and the comparison of PPM software and portfolio tools is where to start. If your gates currently happen in a meeting with a slide deck and no record of the decision, the gap between that and a frozen pack is larger than anything a platform adds on top.
The gate sits next to the evidence it is judging
Stage gate packs
An Excel pack per initiative per gate, frozen at build time, with the score, the case figures, the capacity demand and the decision sheet.
Weighted scoring model
Strategic fit, value, urgency, confidence and risk scored 0 to 100, with risk inverted, so the number in the pack is built the same way every time.
Portfolio rank at review
Where the initiative stood against everything else on the day of the gate, which is the context a single score cannot give a sponsor.
Twelve month capacity plan
FTE demand against available FTE by role and month, so the capacity question at Gate 2 has an answer rather than an opinion.
Pack history per initiative
Every pack built, in order, so the trail from Gate 1 to Gate 4 reads as a sequence of decisions rather than a folder of attachments.
Portfolio export
The register and the plan to Excel or CSV on every plan, for the steering pack, the finance model, or a move to another system.
Questions people ask about stage gate software
What is stage gate software?
Stage gate software runs the decision points between project phases: it holds which gate each initiative sits at, assembles the evidence the gate needs, and records what was decided and by whom. The Portfolio Hub workspace builds an Excel review pack per initiative per gate, freezing the score, the business case figures and the capacity demand as they stood on the review date.
What is the difference between stage gate and phase gate?
Nothing, in practice. They name the same model: work runs in stages, and between them sit gates where a funding decision is made. Stage-Gate is a trademark of Stage-Gate International and is more common in new product development, while phase gate is the wording most IT and transformation PMOs use. Tools described as either do the same job.
What are the stages of the stage gate process?
Most portfolios run five gates. Gate 0 turns an idea into a candidate worth assessing. Gate 1 approves the business case. Gate 2 funds and staffs the work. Gate 3 is a delivery checkpoint partway through. Gate 4 reviews whether the benefits arrived. The workspace ships those five, because they map to the decisions a portfolio actually has to make.
Can you run a stage gate process in Jira or Asana?
You can mark a gate as a status or a task, and many teams do. What those tools will not give you is a frozen record: the fields keep changing after the meeting, so three months later nobody can show what the board saw when it approved the money. If the gate is a governance control rather than a checkbox, it needs a snapshot the record cannot edit.
What should a stage gate review pack contain?
Enough for a sponsor to decide continue, pause or stop in one sitting: the initiative and its sponsor, the stage and delivery status, the portfolio score with how it was built, benefit and cost figures, the capacity it needs, and the dates. Then the decision itself, who made it and when. Anything beyond that gets read by nobody.
How much does stage gate software cost?
Enterprise PPM platforms that include gate workflow are quoted per seat and rarely published, which usually puts a mid-market PMO into five figures a year plus an implementation. Portfolio Hub plans start at $24.50 a month billed yearly. The gap is mostly configuration: a platform models your gate workflow, this ships five gates and a pack format you do not configure.
Pick the plan that matches the size of the portfolio
Starter
$24.50/mo
Billed $294 a year, or $49 monthly
- 5 stage gate packs a month
- 20 initiatives
- 8 delivery roles
Team
$74.50/mo
Billed $894 a year, or $149 monthly
- 40 stage gate packs a month
- 100 initiatives
- 40 delivery roles
Portfolio Office
$199.50/mo
Billed $2,394 a year, or $399 monthly
- Unlimited stage gate packs
- Unlimited initiatives
- Unlimited delivery roles
Hold the next gate with a pack nobody can edit afterwards
Create your account, load one initiative, and build the gate pack before the review instead of writing the minutes after it.