I think that the most crucial phases for the success of a project are the initiating and the planning phases. Initiating phase is where the project manager identifies the project objectives and determines whether the project meets a need in the market. If you don’t pay much attention to this step of project management and end up working on a project that no client or customer is interested in, you will have wasted all the money and the resources available to you with no benefit. This is also the phase where you create the scope for your project, which is something you will need to refer back to in each subsequent phase. Planning phase is where you organize all of the tasks that need to be carried out to complete the project using charts. These charts allow you to set critical paths and deadlines that can be followed to stay on track. Once the project is nicely planned out in this phase, executing, monitoring and closing phases should be pretty easy.