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Project tailoring is the modification of a standard project management methodology to reduce risk by accommodating the unique business and project characteristics of the project.
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Quick reference
Project Tailoring
Project tailoring is the modification of a standard project management methodology to reduce risk by accommodating the unique business and project characteristics of the project.
When to use
Tailoring can be done at any time in the project lifecycle. It is often specifically addressed at the time of project authorization, project planning, and adapting to project lessons learned. However, it can be done at any time.
Instructions
Tailoring is the adaptation of the project approach to accommodate the real-world constraints and attributes of the project. Every project is unique, so every project should be tailored for its uniqueness. The goal of tailoring is to reduce risk. The tailoring considers the high threat risk elements of the project and seeks to eliminate or mitigate those and the tailoring considers the opportunity risks on the project and seeks to take advantage of those.
Every project management decision is essentially a tailoring decision. The inclusion, elimination, or modification of tasks is tailoring. The assignment of individuals is a form of tailoring. Estimating the costs and duration of tasks should be tailored based upon the skill of the resources and the difficulty of the task on the specific project. Adding, deleting, or modifying project meetings and reviews are forms of tailoring the project management approach.
Virtually every aspect of the organization and management of a project can be tailored:
- Life cycle tailoring focuses on the inclusion, exclusion, and sequence of phases, gates, and reviews.
- Process tailoring considers how the various project activities will be accomplished by adding, removing, modifying, and combining activities.
- Engagement tailoring focuses on the people involved and their level of skill, empowerment, and autonomy.
- Tools, methods, and artifacts are tailored based upon unique project requirements and commonly used tools
Tailoring Process
While there are many ways to approach tailoring, I have found this process to work very well:
- Select the baseline methodology, such as toll-gate or Agile, to provide a framework from which to start, the baseline should be something familiar to the team and appropriate for the type of project.
- Tailor for unique business and industry constraints. These are often tied to overriding business strategy or resource issues. Also, depending upon the project, there may be industry oversight and regulatory reviews or deliverables that are mandated. Incorporate these constants into your project approach. These constraints seldom change during the project.
- Tailor for unique project constraints such as capability and capacity of team members or complexity and ambiguity within the project requirements. These constraints frequently change during the project.
- Tailor to incorporate continuous improvement. When the project team finds that something does not work well and something else works very well, they should tailor the remainder of the project to accommodate their findings. Recall the goal is to reduce threat risk. Whenever risk is identified and can be eliminated or mitigated, the project should be tailored to accommodate it.
Hints & tips
- Tailoring should not be considered a failure of project management but rather a success. It should be encouraged, within reason.
- There needs to be a reason for all tailoring decisions. If there is not a good reason to change the established project management methodology, then don’t. There was probably a good reason the methodology was designed that way.
- With every tailoring decision, you should be able to clearly state how this reduces risk. The risk could be a technical risk, cost risk, or schedule risk.
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