Project-specific process tailoring falls within Organizational Process Definition (OPD), a CMMI-DEV level 3 process area. The purpose of OPD is to establish and maintain the overall organization’s processes.  This include definition of processes (based on organization’s process requirements), establishment of organization’s process architecture (how processes relate to each other to best suit the organization’s structure and environments), and definition of tailoring guidelines and procedures. OPD has one specific goal SG 1 Establish Organizational Process Assets, which in turn, has six practices

SP 1.1 Establish Standard Processes

SP 1.2 Establish Lifecycle Model Description

SP 1.3 Establish Tailoring Criteria and Guideline

SP 1.4 Establish the Organization’s Measurement Repository

SP 1.5 Establish the Organization’s Process Asset Library

SP 1.6 Establish Work Environment Standards

In this post, I am only going to get into the details of SP 1.3, but I will talk about other specific practices of this process area in future posts.  Also, I really want to do a post on CMMI level 3 in general.  For me this is the most interesting CMMI level, as it’s so process-focused.

As I have mentioned in my previous post, process tailoring is the process by which organization’s set of standard process are adjusted to better suit a specific development project. In CMMI terminology, organization’s set of standard processes (OSSP) are tailored into a defined process (a suitable process for a project).  More specifically this practice requires that tailoring to start by selecting standard processes–to be tailored–based on defined criteria, adjustments to the selected processes be made based on well defined tailoring guidelines, and defined procedures followed for any deviation from tailoring guidelines.

This may be too formal and demanding for most organizations, but is very beneficial for mature process-centric organizations.   Keep in mind that tools, such as IRIS, automate many aspects of tailoring, such as creations and management of tailoring guidelines and enforcement of the tailoring procedures, hence, substantially reducing the overhead involved.

This is my favorite phrase in CMMI literature. It is what CMMI appraisal follows.

For a process-centric organization modeling its processes using a process modeling tool such as IRIS covers “Say what you do”; enacting the modeled processes during projects covers “Do what you say”; and all the project and process reports and metrics automatically generated by the enactment system more than “Prove it”.

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.

I highly recommend a white paper titled “Process Tailoring and the Software Capability Maturity Model” by Mark Ginsberg and Lauren Quinn. Although written in 1995, the content of this paper is still very relevant today. The full version of this paper is available for download from SEI (Software Development Institute, Carnegie Mellon University) website. Keep in mind that this is a long paper: 53 pages.

I specially found the coverage of “Tailoring Guidelines” informative. I will get into how tailoring guidelines fit in the overall tailoring process in future posts.