I talked about “search and selection” aspects of process tailoring in an earlier post. In this post I’ll get into some of the concepts of “process adjustment”, the next step in process tailoring. Once the project manager has selected a process from his/her organization’s standard processes–based on his/her project criteria, he/she then should adjust the selected process to better suit the project.

The nature of adjustment in this context is difficult to define. It varies greatly from organization to organization.

The first issue is the amount of flexibility allowed during adjustment. It’s important that commonality, generality and integrity of the organization’s standard processes are not compromised as they are adjusted for a particular project. One way to achieve this is by “tailoring guidelines”. Tailoring guidelines are heavily supported and promoted by CMMI. They are developed as a part of process creation. So as process modelers define the organization’s standard processes, they also define tailoring guidelines for these processes. This requires a flexible process modeling tool. IRIS, our process modeling tool, supports user definable attributes for all process elements–roles, activities, workproducts–and has in built-in reporting facility. Using these capabilities we have been able to automate customers’ needs by capturing tailoring information during modeling and generating organization specific tailoring guidelines automatically.

Of course there is much more to process adjustment than tailoring guidelines. I will cover other aspects of this topic in future posts.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under CMMI, 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.