E3 — Stage gates (predictive)
What it is: the project runs in stages, and a decision-maker approves each stage before the next one starts. Bansat’s own gates already work this way. Two widely used sources describe it: the PRINCE2® method (7th edition, 2023, from PeopleCert) and the PMBOK® Guide (8th edition, 2025, from PMI).
Fits: fixed-price or fixed-scope client contracts; public-sector and regulated work that needs evidence of control (D6); work with a hard date and fixed scope. Doesn’t fit: discovery work where the requirements are still unknown, unless each stage builds iteratively inside (the usual hybrid).
The methods, in brief:
- The PRINCE2® method, 7th edition:
- Seven principles: ensure continued business justification; learn from experience; define roles, responsibilities and relationships; manage by stages; manage by exception; focus on products; and tailor to suit the project.
- Seven practices: business case, organising, plans, quality, risk, issues and progress.
- Seven processes, from starting up a project to closing it.
- The 7th edition added people as an integrated element.
- PMBOK® Guide 8th edition:
- Six principles.
- Seven performance domains: governance, scope, schedule, finance, stakeholders, resources and risk.
- Five focus areas: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing.
- Forty processes.
- Tailoring guidance for predictive, adaptive and hybrid approaches.
Both are tailored to the project’s size and risk, and neither has to be heavy.
Where Bansat fits:
| Bansat | In a stage-gate project |
|---|---|
| G0 | The start-up request: is this worth initiating? |
| The blueprint (Parts 0–14) | The initiation documents: business case (1.1–1.3), plans (11.1), quality (11.2–11.3), risk (7.3, RAID in 11.8) |
| G1 | The end of initiation: the decision-maker authorises the project |
| G2, G3 | Stage boundaries: approve the next stage on evidence |
| G4 | Closing the project, then a benefits review against the metrics in 1.3 |
| Change requests (11.8) | Issue and change control: assess the impact, then decide |
| The RACI (11.8) | Who approves each stage |
Agent notes: don’t start work belonging to the next stage before its approval; raise anything that changes time, cost, scope or risk as a change request (11.8) rather than absorbing it; keep the blueprint and the stage plan in step.
How it commonly fails: “PRINCE in name only”, where the documents exist but nobody uses them to decide anything; paperwork that outgrows a small or fast-changing project; and stages so long that problems surface too late. Keep stages short, and build iteratively inside them.
Measures: stage tolerances for time, cost and scope agreed at each boundary; Part 13 status; benefits against 1.3 after launch.
PRINCE2® is a registered trademark of the PeopleCert group. PMBOK® is a registered mark of Project Management Institute, Inc. Both are summarised here in Bansat’s own words; read the originals for the detail.