Tailoring Processes Without Losing Discipline
Every team that has ever reduced a process has had the same uneasy moment. The change is sensible, the effort saved is real, and there is no way to tell from the outside whether what just happened was tailoring or corner-cutting. The two look identical in a plan. They come apart on whether anybody can still answer the question the process existed to answer.
Three questions that make a change defensible
A process produces something that somebody uses. That is the whole of it, and it yields three questions that settle most tailoring decisions inside a minute each.
What does this process produce? Not what it is called, and not what its template contains, but what comes out of it: a decision, a piece of evidence, an agreement, a check that something is safe to proceed. If the honest answer is a document, carry on asking until you reach what the document is for.
Who uses it, and for what? This is the question that finds the processes to stop altogether. A weekly report going to eleven people and informing nobody's decision is not a candidate for simplification. A monthly forecast that the finance business partner uses to release the next tranche of funding is not a candidate for anything, however tedious it is to produce.
What happens if it is absent? The answer scales the change. Where the consequence is that somebody is mildly less well informed, the process can be cut hard. Where the consequence is a piece of equipment energised without an independent check, the process keeps its teeth, and the only open question is what form the teeth take.
A change with answers to all three is defensible in a room full of people who were not there when it was made. A change that cannot answer the second one has found something better than tailoring.
Substituting beats removing
Section 3.3.2 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition treats processes as material to be selected and scaled for the work in hand, and in practice that nearly always takes the shape of substitution. The purpose stays where it is and the apparatus around it changes.
A formal design review with a panel, a pack issued five days in advance and minuted actions can become a forty-minute walkthrough with the two people who would have signed it anyway, recorded in six lines. What made the review valuable was an independent pair of eyes on the design before anybody committed money, and the walkthrough delivers that at a fifth of the cost. What made it expensive was the pack and the minuting, and neither of those was the purpose.
Frequency is the safest dial to turn and the one teams reach for last. A control performed monthly that could run at each phase boundary loses very little, because what it checks does not move weekly. Dropping the control entirely loses everything it was doing. When a reduction is needed and nobody is sure how far to go, turning the frequency down first and watching what happens beats settling it in one move.
Forty subsystems and twelve panels
A water treatment works upgrade had forty subsystems to commission. The client's commissioning framework required a pre-commissioning inspection for each, with a three-person panel, a written protocol issued in advance and a signed certificate. Forty of those, with the panel drawn from people who were also running the works, came to roughly eleven weeks of senior time.
The team put the three questions to it. What the inspection produced was independent confirmation that a subsystem was safe and correct to energise. Who used it was the commissioning manager, who could not proceed without it, and the client's assurance team afterwards. What happened without it was that something got energised on one person's word, which on a water treatment works is a risk nobody wanted to be carrying.
So nothing was deleted. Twenty-eight of the forty were like-for-like replacements of existing equipment in existing positions, and for those the panel became a two-person walkthrough with a photographed checklist and the same signed certificate. The twelve that were new process steps, including everything touching final water quality, kept the full panel. The certificate, the record and the sign-off authority were identical on both routes.
The change saved about six weeks and went through the client's assurance review without a query, because the assurance team could see what had been reduced, why, and who had agreed it. An identical saving made by quietly running fewer inspections would have surfaced in the same review and been written up as a finding.
For a PMP® candidate, the distinction worth carrying is between reducing a process and removing its purpose. A team under time pressure that wants to skip a step is raising the question of what the step is for, and the fitting response usually keeps the purpose and changes the method. Naming what a process produces comes before deciding what can go. Practice on situations where some steps are genuinely safe to drop and others are not is what the tailoring material in a structured PMP exam preparation course is made of.
Write one sentence for each of the three most expensive processes: this produces X, which Y uses to decide Z. Any process where that sentence cannot be finished is the first thing to stop. For the rest, the change goes in writing with a reason and a name against it, because a reduction that nobody recorded will be read, by whoever finds it, as a step somebody forgot.
Interested in going further?
What separates a defensible reduction from a quiet one is almost entirely what gets written down at the time it is made. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through decisions where a process has to be lightened and still stand up to scrutiny.
The material on selecting and scaling processes sits inside the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A018: Policies, Processes and Procedures: When Each Matters
A008: Why Processes Came Back in PMBOK 8
A077: Tailoring in Project Management: What It Actually Means
A083: The Four-Step Tailoring Process Explained
A037: Quality Is Designed In, Not Inspected In
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