magnus919_agent-skills/technical-project-management/references/method-selection.md

Select and tailor the approach

Use when choosing a method or when delivery pain suggests the current method no longer fits. Basis: S01's fit-for-purpose argument and S06's distinction among delivery approaches. This decision procedure is a practical synthesis, not a certification decision tree or a ranking of methodologies.

Diagnose before prescribing

Inspect six things: requirement stability, technical uncertainty, ability to release partial value, cost of reversing a decision, external timing constraints, and actual team autonomy/capacity. Also identify mandatory governance. A team calling its work agile does not prove these conditions hold.

Default to the team's existing adequate approach. Change it only to address an observed problem. Do not use a weighted score to hide a veto condition such as an unavailable safety approver or impossible vendor lead time.

Conditions	Candidate	First check	Failure signal / response
Known deliverable, stable interfaces, expensive irreversible steps	Predictive with staged decisions	Is the dependency plan feasible with actual resources?	Repeated late changes: shorten planning horizon and add discovery
Need to learn what works through feedback	Iterative	Who evaluates the experiment and when?	No feedback access: resolve it before committing more cycles
Useful components can be accepted separately	Incremental	Does each increment work end to end?	Layer-only milestones: redefine around usable capability
Cohesive team, clear product authority, regular inspect/adapt cycle	Scrum	Can the team protect a goal and meet a shared quality bar?	Many unrelated interruptions: fix intake/capacity, consider flow
Variable arrival, support work, aging queues	Flow-based/Kanban	Are start/finish and capacity policies explicit?	WIP growth: investigate bottleneck before adding work
Scarce resources repeatedly delay otherwise independent work	Critical-chain lens	Are resource contention and readiness visible?	Treating buffers as hidden padding: make them explicit and owned
Bounded product opportunity, discretionary scope, protected capacity	Appetite-based/Shape Up	Can leadership actually protect the bet?	Mandatory scope exceeds appetite: reshape or choose a different model
Hardware/vendor stages plus evolving software	Hybrid	Who accepts the cross-method interfaces?	Two conflicting plans: establish one milestone/decision record

Predictive is a planning approach; Scrum is a framework; critical path and critical chain are scheduling techniques; PRINCE2 is a project management method; Kanban manages flow. They are not interchangeable alternatives at one abstraction level. Stage governance can coexist with iterative delivery. Iterative learning does not necessarily produce a releasable increment; incremental delivery need not entail high uncertainty. Do not call all of these "agile" without qualification.

Make the choice actionable

Write an approach decision: observed conditions, selected approach, nearest rejected alternative, who decides scope and dates, cadence, required evidence, and revisit trigger. Define the first inspection point. Explain only the tradeoff the user needs, rather than reciting the whole matrix.

Example (hypothetical): a device project has a long-lead board order and uncertain calibration software. Use a staged procurement decision for hardware and short software learning cycles, tied to an integrated prototype acceptance milestone. Do not let software sprint completion imply the device is ready for certification.

Edge cases and exit

Mandatory organizational methods constrain tailoring: surface a justified exception request rather than quietly replacing the method. A small team does not need separate meetings for every practice. A multi-project program may need an additional benefits and governance owner; expose that need instead of promising this skill replaces enterprise program management.

Complete when one approach and its adaptations address the diagnosed conditions, its coordination contract is explicit, and a review trigger exists.