Tailor for the Project You Actually Have
Most tailoring gets done for a project that is not quite the one in front of the team. Sometimes it is done for the project as described in the business case, where the team was dedicated and the requirements were settled. More often it is done for a project somebody ran two years ago that looked similar from a distance.
Both are comfortable, and both produce a proportion fitted to the wrong work. Tailoring for the project you actually have starts by describing it in plain facts, with no adjectives in them, and setting the amount of each practice from those.
The project you described and the project you have
The first self-deception is the plan as bid. A tailoring decision taken during mobilisation usually rests on commitments made in a proposal: a dedicated team of six, a client product owner available two days a week, a requirements set signed off before build. When those turn out differently, and they turn out differently by about a third, the tailoring built on them carries on as though nothing has moved. A light change process designed around a product owner who could decide on the spot becomes a bottleneck once that person is available for an hour on Thursdays.
The second is the pattern match. A project resembling a previous one in size, client, duration and technology inherits the previous one's approach, which is efficient and frequently right. It goes wrong on the dimension nobody compared. Two transitions of the same size for the same client can differ completely in whether the cutover can be undone, and that single difference should reshape more of the approach than everything the two have in common.
Five facts that set the proportion
Section 3.4.3 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition is the step where a project's own conditions settle how much of each practice is warranted, and five facts do most of that work. None of them needs an adjective.
What happens if this goes wrong. Not how important the project is, which everybody overstates, but what the consequence actually is: a service outage reaching customers, a regulatory breach, a missed trading period, an internal inconvenience. Consequence sets the floor under the controls.
How reversible the decisions are. This is the fact most often left out, and it deserves more weight than it usually gets. A decision that can be undone in a fortnight needs less scrutiny than one that cannot be undone at all, and the controls belong at the points of no return, which are two or three specific moments rather than a general level of rigour spread evenly across ten months.
How novel this is to this team. Not whether it is novel in the world. A team doing something for the first time needs more checking, more review and shorter cycles; a team that has done it eleven times needs less of all three. Organisations routinely apply the same process to both, which over-controls the experienced team and leaves the inexperienced one unsupported.
How many parties are involved. Every additional organisation brings an interface, a contract, a decision calendar and a set of assumptions nobody has written down. A project with four suppliers needs coordination practices a single-team project does not, and the coordination is usually where the time goes.
How long it runs. Duration changes what is needed, because a nine-month project can hold its context in people's heads and a three-year one cannot. Long work needs stronger documentation, deliberate knowledge transfer and a way of bringing in people who arrive in year two, and none of that matters much on something finishing before anybody leaves.
Two transitions, one difference
A shared services provider was taking on an IT service desk from a client, about forty people, across a nine-month transition. The same team had completed a finance back-office transition for the same client eighteen months earlier: same size, same timeline, largely the same people running it. They reused the tailored approach, which looked sensible and took ten minutes to decide.
The finance move had been reversible. The client's team stayed in place for six weeks after cutover, running in parallel, and on two occasions work went back to them for a day while something was sorted out. The tailoring reflected that: a light change process, a single cutover decision taken by the transition manager, and no formal rollback plan, because rollback meant asking the client team to carry on for another week.
The service desk was not reversible. The client's staff left on the Friday, the telephony and ticketing routing moved that night, and parallel running was impossible because there was only one set of phone numbers. The same light approach went into a situation where the cutover decision was the largest single decision in the programme and nothing could be undone after it.
What surfaced on the night was that nobody had defined what would make the cutover a no-go. The routing change ran at eleven with two known defects in the knowledge base and a supervisor four days into the job, and the decision to proceed was taken by one person at eleven at night, because the approach had never asked anybody to write the conditions down in advance. It worked in the end, at a cost of three difficult weeks. The tailoring change that would have prevented it was a single item: for an irreversible cutover, go and no-go criteria agreed and signed by the service owner a week beforehand.
For a PMP® candidate, the fact worth weighting is reversibility, because it changes what a situation calls for more than size or budget ever does. A team applying a standard process to a decision that cannot be undone is describing a proportionality failure, and the fitting response strengthens the control at that one point instead of raising it everywhere. Of any decision in a situation, ask what it would take to reverse it. Practising that across projects that look alike and behave differently is the judgement a structured PMP exam preparation course works to develop.
Write the five facts on one side of paper before touching the framework, and write them with somebody who had no hand in the bid. Then mark the two or three moments in the plan where a decision cannot be undone, and check that the controls around those moments are heavier than the controls anywhere else. On most projects they are not, and correcting that one thing is worth more than any other tailoring decision on the table.
Interested in going further?
The approach that worked last time is the most tempting starting point and the hardest one to examine honestly. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where two projects look alike and one of them needs something quite different.
Tailoring for a project's own conditions is the third step of the tailoring work in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A079: What Should You Tailor on a Project?
A078: Tailoring in Project Management: What It Means and Why It Matters
A085: Tailor for the Organisation Before Tailoring for the Project
A088: How to Tailor Across the Seven Performance Domains
A080: Tailoring the Life Cycle and Development Approach
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
