Tailoring Never Stops: Ongoing Improvement in Delivery
The tailoring decision taken at mobilisation was made with the least information the project will ever have. That is no criticism of it, because somebody had to settle how the work would run before the work started. It does mean the decision rests on assumptions, and the project then spends several months testing every one of them.
Ongoing improvement is the habit of noticing when an assumption has failed and adjusting the approach on purpose. The alternative is not a stable approach. It is drift: ceremonies quietly lapsing, reports quietly continuing, and a written process nobody has followed since March.
What actually changes under a project
Three things move, and they move at different speeds.
What is known about the work changes fastest. An approach built around uncertainty in the integration turns out to have been built around the wrong uncertainty, because the integration behaved and the data did not. Practices set up to manage a risk that has since resolved keep running on momentum, and the practices nobody set up, because the risk was invisible in month one, are the ones now needed.
Who is involved changes next. A new sponsor arrives with a different appetite for reporting and a different tolerance for surprise. A supplier joining in month five brings a contract, a cadence and a set of controls the original tailoring never contemplated. A team that was four people in March and eleven by September cannot be coordinated the way it was in March.
What the organisation will tolerate changes slowest and matters most when it moves. An audit finding elsewhere in the business, a regulatory change, a bad experience on a neighbouring programme: any of those can shift the envelope the project was tailored inside, and the shift is usually towards more evidence.
The signs that something needs adjusting
Section 3.4.4 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition treats improving the tailored approach as part of the tailoring work itself, which leaves the practical question of what to watch. Five signals are reliable, and every one of them is visible without asking anybody anything.
People stop preparing for a meeting. Attendance holds up while preparation falls away, which means the meeting has stopped producing a decision and has turned into a report delivered aloud.
A document gets produced and never cited. If nobody has referred to the risk report in a meeting for two months, it is informing nothing, whatever its quality.
The same decision keeps going upwards. A threshold sending four things a week to the sponsor was set for a different project, or for this project as it was understood in month one.
A control keeps finding nothing. A risk review that has raised no new risk across three cycles is either running on a project with no uncertainty, which is unlikely, or has stopped looking properly, which is common.
A ceremony changes its audience. A stand-up that was a coordination event between team members and is now delivered to the project manager has become a status meeting with a misleading name, and whatever coordination it used to do is happening elsewhere or not at all.
The twenty-first store
A retailer was rolling out new point-of-sale and network equipment across a hundred and forty stores over nine months. The approach tailored at the start gave every store a full site survey, a design sign-off and a post-installation review, which was entirely sensible for an estate nobody had surveyed in a decade.
By store twenty, the surveys had stopped paying for themselves. A hundred and twenty-two of the stores were one of three standard formats, and the surveys were returning the same answers at two days and a visit each. The post-installation reviews, meanwhile, had found the same fault four times: the network handover from the provider left one configuration item unset, and nobody discovered it until the store tried to trade.
The adjustment came at the month-three review and ran in both directions. Surveys for standard-format stores became a photographed checklist completed by the installer on arrival, with full surveys kept for the eighteen non-standard sites. The post-installation review moved to the evening before opening and gained a specific check on the provider's configuration. Both changes went into the written approach with a date and a reason against them.
The survey change took about four days out of the average store's cycle time. The review change caught the configuration fault on eleven further stores before any of them opened, which is a better return than the surveys ever managed. A team treating its tailoring decision as settled would have made neither change.
For a PMP® candidate, the useful reading is that an approach becoming unsuitable is a normal event and not a planning failure. A team that has drifted from its own process is often describing a process that stopped fitting, and the response that works names what changed and adjusts deliberately, with a record. Ask what has moved since the approach was chosen, before deciding whether the team or the process is at fault. Working through situations where the process is the thing that has to change is the sort of judgement a structured PMP exam preparation course keeps in view.
On a live project, attach the question to something already in the calendar. At each phase boundary, or every eighth iteration, ask one thing: which part of how we are working has stopped earning its place? Then change one or two things, write down what and why, and leave everything else alone, because a team that changes six things at once learns nothing about which of them helped.
Interested in going further?
Knowing that an approach should change is easier than knowing which part of it, and by how much, without unpicking something that works. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through delivery situations where adjusting the method is the decision on the table.
Improving a tailored approach while the project is running is part of the tailoring material in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A077: Tailoring in Project Management: What It Actually Means
A083: The Four-Step Tailoring Process Explained
A122: Tailoring Schedule Management for Adaptive Delivery
A165: Tailoring Risk Management to the Project
A088: How to Tailor Across the Seven Performance Domains
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