Choose the right delivery approach: agile, waterfall, or hybrid
Assesses your project's characteristics to recommend a delivery approach, with the practices and governance to match.
The prompt
Help me choose the right delivery approach for my project.
Project: [WHAT we are delivering and for whom]
Requirements clarity: [well known and stable / partly known / likely to change a lot]
Ability to deliver in increments: [can users get value from partial releases?]
Fixed constraints: [regulatory approvals, contract terms, hardware lead times, fixed launch date]
Team: [size, location, experience with agile or waterfall]
Stakeholders: [how often they can engage, how they expect to see progress]
Organization's governance: [funding model, stage gates, reporting expectations]
Assess the project on: requirements uncertainty, technical uncertainty, cost of change late in the project, ability to release incrementally, stakeholder availability, team readiness, and compliance needs. Score each and explain how it pushes toward a predictive, adaptive, or hybrid approach.
Rules: do not default to agile or waterfall - recommend what fits. If parts of the project differ (e.g. infrastructure vs. software features), it is fine to recommend different approaches for different parts.
Return:
1. An assessment table: factor | rating | what it suggests.
2. My recommended approach and the reasoning.
3. The specific practices to use (e.g. sprints, release planning, baselined schedule, change control) and the ones to skip.
4. How to report progress and handle governance with this approach.
5. The main risks of this choice and early warning signs it is not working.
6. A short explanation I can give my sponsor.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Thinking & Decisions prompts
What to fill in
- WHAT we are delivering and for whom
- well known and stable / partly known / likely to change a lot
- can users get value from partial releases?
- size, location, experience with agile or waterfall
- how often they can engage, how they expect to see progress
- funding model, stage gates, reporting expectations
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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