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A quick summary of the facts -
Multinational Company
Traditional Waterfall Project Management
Agile/Scrum being used for the Design/Test/Build (>25 Sprints)
Traditional Waterfall Gates must be approved to progress
Stakeholders want a mini-gate to bookend each sprint to measure
adherence to schedule
Can this approach work and what artifacts should suffice for the Waterfall Governance?
This is basically what Sprint Reviews in Scrum are about. At the beginning of each sprint, the team commits to deliver a working, deployable product increment including a certain number of backlog items. And in the end of each sprint, the team demonstrates to stakeholders the new features they have completed.
In Scrum (and Agile approaches in general), the only real measure of progress is working software. In my experience, most stakeholders can be made pretty happy by showing them working, deployable software instead of (or on top of) documents, charts and promises of future results. YMMV - your stakeholders may want to see some documents like test reports, user documentation etc. on top of the product demo itself though, so be open to negotiation.
Vote up for Péter for the input on Sprint Review
I have been in a similar traditionally non-agile environment. Based on my experience,to answer your questions
Can this approach work
Yes, it could work.
But it depends on how available the stakeholders are for the review & for approval. Any delays in approvals could create delays in progress & planning of next sprints.
It also depends on their understanding of Agile which enables your stakeholders to make correct decisions on which artifacts are optional for waterfall governance & see what artifacts in Scrum replaces them
And the other thing I want to emphasise is that stakeholders are mainly concerned about "adherence to schedule" which might communicate to the team that completing the tasks is the biggest priority while reality could be far from this
what artifacts should suffice for the Waterfall Governance?
Different organisations have different time tested waterfall methodologies and require different artifacts for governance. So it really depends on the process your organisation is following. The artifacts defined in scrum (Product backlog, Sprint backlog & any other similar reports) should be sufficient for successful governance of the project.
since the requirement is usually at the organisation end, a good starting point is to consult the process team (I hope your organisation have one based on the summary you have given, your stakeholders might also be able to give an input on this :) ) & try to identify what artifacts in your governance model can be replaced with scrum artifacts and what are optional.
Hope this helps
