The best design and implementation of project phases is to have each 'phase' be a child record of the parent record.
AND because it sounds like you already have the sequence figured out. You would create a 'template phase' list. Then each time you start a new project, you click a button (that runs a script) and copies all of your templates, to the live project.
There are different thoughts on how to organize your templates, but if this sounds like it will work for you, let me know and I can provide my 'methods' for doing this.