Five Phases Are Enough

Building project management software, it is easy to keep making it more and more complex.

Construction has its process, manufacturing has its process, consulting has its process. Even within the same industry, two companies will tell you:

"Our process is different from everyone else's."

That statement is certainly true.

But while designing Snappy PM, we have increasingly felt that something else is also true:

The skeleton of most projects is actually not that different.

So in the end we unified Snappy PM's project flow into five Phases:

1. Requirement Capturing First figure out what the customer actually wants.

2. Scoping & Design Turn requirements into scope, a solution, and a quotation — and finally get the customer's confirmation.

3. Implementation or Manufacturing Actually start executing, purchasing, producing, or completing the work.

4. Deployment or Installation Deliver the result to the customer, or complete on-site installation and deployment.

5. Closing Finish invoicing, collection, and settlement — then close the project.

Not every business needs to go through all five stages.

A consulting firm may have no Manufacturing.

A purely digital service company may have no Installation.

A furniture manufacturer may have all five.

But we no longer try to invent a new Project Management System for every company.

The five phases stay the same. The business decides how they apply.

Behind this is actually a very simple management idea.

The place where a project most easily runs into trouble is usually not the lack of a complex flowchart. It is that nobody knows:

Where exactly are we right now?

Has the customer's requirement been confirmed?

Has the quotation been accepted?

Can production start?

Is the thing finished?

Has it been delivered?

Has the money been fully collected?

If these most basic questions cannot be answered clearly, even the most complex Project Management System is meaningless.

So Snappy PM's five Phases are more like five shared checkpoints.

And we set ourselves another principle:

Nothing advances on a bare click.

A project should not move from one phase to the next just because someone casually clicked a button.

It should move because something real happened:

The customer confirmed the quotation.

Materials have been allocated.

The project has been delivered.

The payment has been settled.

In other words, project status should be the result of business facts, not a manually maintained label.

This is also why I increasingly like simple systems.

What a business really needs is often not more Statuses, more Workflows, and more Configuration.

It is a shared language that everyone can understand:

What does the customer need?

What did we agree to deliver?

Are we doing it?

Did we deliver it?

Did we get paid?

Five Phases.

For many small businesses, that may already be enough.

SnapLedger, your life easier.