In the last few posts, I’ve been elaborating on an upcoming column I wrote for PM Network magazine. In those posts, we discovered that methodology doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t stop us from engaging in the methodology wars. In particular, the methodology war is about whether process compliance or process customization is more important for tailoring your work to the job at hand. It’s been an active conversation, with alternate posts offered up by Bob Tarne, Glen Allen, Pawel Brodzinski, Andrew Sparks, and Tathagat Varma.
Certainly, the debate between compliance-to-methodology vs. customizing-methodology is interesting. But I want to take a detour to a more fundamental question about exactly process tailoring is in the first place. Project Management experts have told us that to be effective, you have to tailor your organization’s processes for the specific context and constraints of a specific project. But they never told us HOW to do that. Exactly HOW am I supposed to know what parts are fixed, and which parts can be altered or pitched? Since no one ever gave me a good answer, I offer the following framework:
Step 1: Start With What Is Easiest.
Usually that means you start with what you have. If your organization has been using an internal procedure standard for years, then it makes sense to use that standard as a baseline for how to get work done. On the other hand, if you’ve just launched a new division or a new startup, it will be easiest to choose from a more industry-wide process standard. Doing so will give you access to more training and coaching options to get your staff setup. Whatever you do, don’t be dramatic. If you start with something that simply doesn’t fit your culture, you’ll find a lot of resistance to all the ideas, even the good ones.
Step 2: Delivery Early, Deliver Often.
The entire point of a project is to execute a strategic objective. Whatever execution framework you choose (PMBOK, Scrum, RUP, etc), you have to be able to deliver to your customer…frequently. One of your greatest risk mitigation strategies is to use your process standard to deliver completed work as soon as possible, rather than all at once. Once a work package is delivered, you no longer need to manage the project risk associated with that work package. Furthermore, your sponsors will be satisfied at having preliminary or intermediate results as a track record towards the final result. The best project management metric out there is delivered results.
Step 3: Inspect and Adapt.
How many organizations hold a lessons-learned meeting only after the project is completed? Why? Shouldn’t we be learning lessons about how to be more effective, while the project is actually underway? What if half of your communications team caught the flu in the middle of a project, the same time your subject matter expert suffered a death in the family? Did your methodology have a flowchart for that? It may tell you to crash the schedule or reallocate staff, but the project team will know better than the methodology whether doing so will impact higher priority items. A good project manager will schedule recurring project reviews, where he or she can foster a relentless commitment to process improvement. How can our process be more effective? How can we tailor it to deliver more business value earlier in the project timeline?
Step 4: Go Back To Step 2.
Once you’ve implemented a few tweaks here and there, you’ll be tempted to think that you’re finished with tailoring. However, management is never finished. The secret to a becoming a high-performing team is to be obsessed on delivering more quality, more product, more services, more often, but in a regulated fashion. Don’t burn out, but don’t get complacent. Once you’ve improved a few of your processes and procedures, go back and re-evaluate your deliverables. Then, perform another lessons-learned to become even more effective. Get into the Jim Collins’ flywheel principle, where you get better and better, gradually, consistently.
Granted, all of this is easier said than done. In the last several months, I have been working for one project sponsor that has deep anxiety over changes in the project plan, especially as the final delivery date comes closer. She’s made very significant commitments to her stakeholders, and thus, to her, change represents risk. She doesn’t want to hear that everyone failed to comply with the project process, nor will it comfort her to hear that change is just fine. My role as a project manager is to explain that we merely started with the process standard, and that success is based on how well we adapt.
So what do you think? Does this make sense as a project tailoring framework? Have you formalized your tailoring approach in a different way?
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Hey Jesse,
While I agree, aren’t you telling us WHEN to tailor the process rather than HOW to tailor the process? I am hearing start simple, inspect and adapt. How to do choose what to tailor and how to you get organizational support when many folks seem to value consistency. There is a huge sub-class of folks that really just want to be told how to do things, and then do it that way every time.
I appreciate your commitment to publishing. I enjoy your posts!
Mike
I appreciate the affirmation.
Hmm…How do you choose what to tailor? Well, in Step 2, choosing what to tailor should be driven first and foremost by a commitment to deliver. Many will immediately begin to shed a process document because it’s just annoying, rather than asking what the impact would be to getting something approved and out the door. If your organization tells you that annoying document is needed for regulatory compliance, then in Step 3, you respond to that feedback by generating the thing.
Yes, there is a huge sub-class of people that want to do color-by-numbers management. It can be argued that following all the rules all the time, alleviates the need to waste mental energy on the process, and focus on project delivery. However, when the process you started with (Step 1) starts to get in the way of delivery (Step 2), then you need to tailor away those obstacles to become more effective (Step 3). But, I guess I’m starting to delve into another post about specifics.
Jesse, and it is very heartening to see an eventual (inevitable ?) and definitive shift from being prescritive (whether Waterfall, CMM, PMI or Agile) to being pragmatic about how one should not go by the glossy marketing brochures of various snake-oil brands, but really go about tailoring the right solution from an quintessentially canned solution. You hit the nail on its head when you talk about tailoring. Incidentally, CMM was all about tailoring (especially at Level 3 and above) but sadly, people ignored that and only take home the perception that CMM is all about blind compliance to non-negotiable processes and documentation overkill. Similarly, Agile methods are built on the premise of ‘inspect and adapt’ but sadly, that doesn’t seem to apply to the very methods themselves! I find it not only strange, but tragic. A firm believer in ‘horses for courses’, I think it’s about time we woke up to the real world and understood that customers couldn’t care less what methodology we love, and any methodology is only as good as its results, not its pedigree.
~TV
TV, I totally agree with your point about the intent and results of CMMI. Perhaps this is a common tragedy with most of these methodologies: what was intended to be an institutionalization of getting better, simply became institutionalization. It’s a paradox I have yet to figure out.
Thanks to all.
When deploying SW-CMM level 2 in a big company, I had issues with some people (e.g. sw quality assurance leader) who were so obsessed by CMM practices instead of real common sens practices.
CMM is sometimes for the marketing image of the company.
I don’t see much “tailoring” in this article as much as I see “adapting”.
PS: I did publish a few years back a series on creating your own methodology, the series is quite generic, but can be easily applied in the context of Project Management.
This is another part of the methodology paradox: the value of a packaged product morphs into a marketing obsession. Just as organizations miss the improvement for the CMMi label, so pracitioners miss the effective management for the PMP or CSM label.
PM Hut, I wonder what the difference is between tailoring and adapting. Aren’t they the same thing? Namely, taking a methodololgy and adhering to the core essense, while customizing the parts that need to be fit to the current project’s unique context.
Jesse, I see tailoring as changing the methodology to align with the organization culture, adapting, on the other hand, is changing the organization culture to be fit with the methodology.
Ahhh. Nice distinction. My intent was to go after “tailoring”, rather than “adapting”. I guess I need to elaborate with some concrete examples.