What Should You Tailor on a Project?
The list of things a project can tailor is longer than most people expect. The life cycle, the development approach, the processes used, the methods inside them, the artefacts produced, the governance arrangements, the documentation, the roles, the controls, the way stakeholders are engaged, what gets measured, and how often anything happens. Twelve items, near enough, and a team free to change all of them could reshape a project completely.
Almost no team is free to change all of them, and the ones they can change without asking sit mostly at the low-value end. That mismatch is worth understanding before anybody spends an afternoon on tailoring, because effort spent at the bottom of the list produces a tidier project that behaves exactly as it did before.
The three that decide the most
Development approach and life cycle sit at the top, because everything downstream inherits from them. Whether the work is delivered once at the end, in planned phases or incrementally settles what a schedule can look like, when feedback arrives, what a baseline means and how change gets handled. The choice deserves its own treatment, and it is the one tailoring decision that is genuinely hard to reverse halfway through.
Governance intensity comes second and is the most under-used of the three. What the project manager may decide, what needs the sponsor, what needs a board, and at what value or risk the line falls: those settings govern how fast a project can move far more than any process description does. A project where every change above two thousand pounds goes to a monthly board carries a built-in delay of up to four weeks on every discovery, and that delay is a tailoring decision somebody took, usually by leaving the organisation's default where it was.
Cadence is third and the cheapest to change. How often the project reports, reviews, replans, meets its steering group and looks at its risks should track the rate at which the project's situation actually moves. A shutdown that changes hourly and a policy programme that changes quarterly, both running a fortnightly rhythm, means one of them is drowning and the other is asleep.
The middle of the list
Section 3.3 of the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition sets out what can be tailored, and the middle of that list is where most of the practical gains sit once the top three are settled.
Artefacts and documentation are tailored by asking what each is for and who reads it. A risk report and a risk register serve different audiences, and a small project may genuinely need only one of them. A project producing a document nobody has read twice is producing evidence of compliance and nothing else.
Controls scale with consequence. Configuration control, formal acceptance, independent review and audit trails all cost real time, and how much of each is warranted depends on what happens if the control is absent, not on the size of the budget. Large-budget work with low consequence is routinely over-controlled, and small work with high consequence is routinely under-controlled.
Measurement is tailored by asking what anybody would do differently as a result. A project reporting eleven metrics of which two are ever discussed has nine to stop collecting. The test is whether a movement in the number would change somebody's behaviour this month.
Roles are the item people forget. Who chairs the review, who owns the backlog, who signs off acceptance, whether there is a delivery lead distinct from the project manager: all tailorable, and on work spanning two organisations they are usually the first thing that has to be.
A fourteen-day shutdown and a signature
An oil terminal was running a planned fourteen-day shutdown, several hundred work items against a fixed restart date and a cost per day of delay that everyone in the planning office could recite from memory. The contractor's project framework had been tailored before the work began. The tailoring had produced a shorter daily report, a combined risk and issue log, and a simplified handover form.
All three were sensible, and not one of them touched what actually cost the shutdown time. Discovery work, the items found only once a vessel is open, ran at around thirty a day. Each needed a client decision to proceed, and the framework routed every one of them to a client engineer covering two sites who answered inside twenty-four hours. About a third of the discovered items waited a day. Across fourteen days that waiting came to something near two shifts of lost progress spread over the crews.
The tailoring that would have mattered was a governance one: a named client representative on site with authority to approve discovery work up to an agreed value, reset each morning, with anything larger escalated. It was discussed and never done, because the report format lay inside the contractor's gift and the client's delegation of authority did not. That is the usual shape of the problem, and it is why a tailoring conversation is worth having with the person who owns the constraint in the room.
For a PMP® candidate, the work is to identify which item on the list a situation is really about. A team complaining about paperwork is often describing a cadence or a governance problem, and changing the paperwork leaves the cause exactly where it was. A project missing dates with a healthy-looking process is often describing a development approach that does not suit the work. Locate the constraint before choosing what to adjust, because the adjustment that first suggests itself is usually the cosmetic one. Working through that across situations of different shapes is one of the exercises a structured PMP exam preparation course sets.
Run the list once and mark each item with who can change it. The marking usually shows three or four inside the project manager's gift, half a dozen needing the sponsor, and two or three belonging to the organisation. Then take whichever item would change the most and needs somebody else's agreement, and go and ask for it. One conversation about a delegation limit is worth more than an afternoon redesigning a report.
Interested in going further?
Most tailoring effort goes into the items a team can change without asking, which are rarely the items holding the project back. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the adjustment that would help needs somebody else's agreement.
What can be tailored, and how far, is set out in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A086: Tailor for the Project You Actually Have
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.
