For over a year now I have spent large percentage of my time on developing process tailoring systems. Although I had much appreciation for the importance of process tailoring, the deeper I get into it the more I realize what a paramount role it plays in the overall application of processes in an organization. Unfortunately, there are not much resources and discussions on this topic. In this and future posts I’ll try to discuss some interesting aspects of process tailoring.

First let’s clarify what we mean by process tailoring. Process tailoring is the adjustment made to an existing organization’s process to better suit a specific project. In most cases a project manager will tailor one of the organization’s standard processes to better suit his/her project. This takes place once the project is approved and before the process starts. By process tailoring we really mean “project-specific process tailoring”.

One aspect of tailoring that I find interesting is search and select. It may not be apparent, at the first glance, to some people that the activities of searching for and selecting of a process are part of tailoring, but up on further reflection, it becomes apparent that these activities make up the first part of project-specific process tailoring. Process-centric organizations have large number of standard processes. In most cases these processes are defined and maintained by process engineers—who may be part of organization’s SPEG. Ideally these processes are accessible organization wide-–another interesting topic for a future discussion. As a starting point, project managers should be able to easily find and select a process from their organization’s standard processes that best suits their projects. This requires flexible query of process repository based on project specific criteria. For example, a project manager may want to find a process suitable for a small project with fewer than 10 developers. Another project manager may want to find a process suitable for a large geographically distributed team with high emphasis on quality. Once the search request returns processes matching the project criteria, the project manager should be able to access an overview and details of the processes before selecting one.

The next step in tailoring is to make adjustments to the selected process to better fit the specific project. This will be the topic of my next post.

In summary, process search and select are an important part of project-specific process tailoring.

As the final note, processes are meant to make the job of project managers easier not to add additional overhead to their already heavy load. Hence it’s critical that tailoring systems be user friendly and intuitive.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Processes & Methodologies, Tailoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.