5 Project Management Phases for Small Business Owners

A new project—whether that’s a marketing initiative, a new product, or a website redesign—can be exciting and sometimes chaotic. Effective project management can help minimize that chaos while keeping spirits high, and ensure that your business is using resources efficiently and consistently achieving results. 

Business projects typically go through five distinct phases that constitute the typical project management life cycle. Master these project management phases so you can keep your team aligned and focused on the end result.

Here’s a look at the five phases of the project management life cycle, as well as some tips for successful project management.

What is the project management life cycle?

The project management life cycle is a multistage framework that guides a project from initial idea to finished result. It provides a clearly defined road map that helps key project stakeholders navigate complex business goals—like rebranding or creating a new product line—and helps them stay organized and effectively use company resources.

The Project Management Institute (PMI), a global authority on project management research and standards, divides the typical project life cycle into five project phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. Businesses of all sizes can apply these project life cycle phases to ensure successful project outcomes.

A small ecommerce business, for instance, might use the project life cycle approach to manage website launches, product releases, or marketing campaigns while keeping timelines, budgets, and employee responsibilities under control. The project management process provides a structure for you to consistently deliver great customer experiences.

5 project management phases

1. Initiation
2. Planning
3. Execution
4. Monitoring
5. Closure

The five phases of project management follow a repeatable approach, from initiation to closure.

1. Initiation

In the project initiation phase, you evaluate a project idea for its business value. You or a project manager identify key stakeholders, clarify high-level project objectives, and create a project charter or scope of work document. This is a document that outlines project goals, scope, and measures of success. When evaluating complex projects with ambitious goals, you can also use the initiation phase to assess technical feasibility. Even if it’s just you managing the project by yourself, set it up for success by mapping everything out at the start.

Think practically but also expansively, as Legendary Rootz founder Raven Gibson did. “I’ve gotten better about not keeping things in the vault,” Raven says on the Shopify Masters podcast. “I use Notion, a database where I keep all of my ideas. I keep track of the bodies I envision this design on, how I envision marketing it. … [If] I’m inspired, I get an idea, I take that idea, and I put it in Notion and sit with it.” If the idea holds up, Raven says she moves on to creating a project management plan.

2. Planning

During the planning phase, you develop a comprehensive project management plan that serves as the blueprint for the entire project. This stage involves breaking down the work into smaller, manageable tasks. Your project plan should include a project timeline to keep your team on task, along with resource management guidelines to ensure that project activities get what they need to succeed—from funding to raw materials to human labor. Team leaders often develop contingency plans at this stage to ensure the project runs smoothly if something goes awry (e.g., if a vendor misses a deadline or a team member leaves to join another company).

“I’m a big fan of what I call forward thinking, backwards planning,” says Nick Bare, CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition. “I look into the future—whether that’s next week or next month or next year, or maybe 10 years from now—and I have a vision of where I want to be, what I want to be doing, who I want to be doing it with, what that looks like,” he explains on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. Having settled on the goal, he then suggests, “Backwards plan from that moment in time until today, asking: What do we need to accomplish? What milestones do we need to check from now until then to get there?”

3. Execution

The project execution phase is where ideas and plans turn into real-world project deliverables. For example, you might move ahead on capital expenditures, begin production of a new product line, or launch a marketing campaign on a new social media platform. In this phase, you complete tasks and coordinate day-to-day work while staying aligned with the project’s scope and goals.

During this phase, teams often employ project management software for organization and collaboration. Tools like Asana, ClickUp, Basecamp, and Zoho Projects help you share project documents, assign tasks, and track progress as you work toward successful project delivery. Shopify merchants can get further help managing projects from native platform tools like Shopify Admin, which allows for project tracking and operations management. Shopify Plus merchants can use Shopify Flow, an automation tool for project workflows.

4. Monitoring

The monitoring phase, which often runs concurrently with the execution phase, is where you keep tabs on project progress by comparing actual results against your project plan and project timeline. During these third and fourth phases, you’ll track critical success factors like budget burn and task completion rates—and you should be prepared to pivot quickly in the event of poor project performance. For ecommerce companies, this often means watching for inconsistencies that emerge as work is distributed across vendors, platforms, and marketing channels.

David Louvet, CEO of Innovet Pet, discovered the value of monitoring as he scaled up his business supplying cannabidiol (CBD) oil extract for dogs. “One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is maintaining consistency and a cohesive brand identity across all channels,” David tells the Shopify Masters podcast. “To address this, I’ve set up clear branding and messaging guidelines and regularly monitor and update our campaigns.”

5. Closure

The closure phase formally completes the project and transitions deliverables to clients, stakeholders, or senior management. The project closing phase also offers project managers the chance to conduct a project review and capture lessons learned to improve future projects.

“In Japan, there’s a principle called Kaizen, which is continuous improvement,” Shizu Okusa, founder of herbal remedy retailer Apothékary. As Shizu explains on the Shopify Masters podcast, “There is never going to be a day that we’re perfect.” 

Take the time to get stakeholder feedback, including from customers, employees, and suppliers. Their feedback can be invaluable for spotting areas for improvement and incorporating lessons learned into your next project.

Tips for successful project management

Successful project management requires conscientious planning and commitment to follow through on each phase of the project management life cycle. 

An important way to stay organized is to prevent scope creep—where projects slowly get bigger and more unwieldy. Establish specific project objectives, deliverables, and success criteria early. This helps maintain focus and keeps stakeholders aligned throughout all phases. Create a detailed work plan that clearly defines team member roles and responsibilities, and spell out what the project will and will not include. Clearly articulate your performance expectations and metrics for evaluating success.

While project management phases offer a repeatable model, they still leave room for different management approaches so you can match your approach to the nature of the work you’re taking on. The waterfall methodology is great for linear, sequential projects like opening a new retail store. The agile method is an iterative approach that may be a good choice for digital marketing teams because it gives them the flexibility to react quickly to trends and customer feedback. The iterative process—a method for problem solving that emphasizes repeated rounds of planning, execution, evaluating, and refining—is often a useful approach for new product development. For complex projects like developing a new product, an iterative approach allows you to release a prototype or small batch, gather customer feedback, and then refine the product for the next iteration.