At my current job, the Project Management processes of Initiating, Planning, Executing, and Closing were both generally not easy to follow and generally not as clear cut as I had originally thought. Occasionally, one of these phases would be considered completed by upper management and have to be revisited if a critical design change or problem with the instrument was detected. This mostly occurred in response to deadlines approaching putting pressure on the PM to complete a certain phase of a project by a deadline. I have heard of, in the past, a phase being declared completed only to result in the next phase encountering a magnitude of unsolved issues that should have been accounted for previously. In this particular case, it was a minor software issue which should have been resolved much earlier, however, was pushed through to meet a deadline. In the end, excess time, money, and jobs were sacrificed in order to catch the back up to date. Basically, politics gets in the way of an ideal stepwise progression of the PM processes more than it should.