Bringing Process Maturity to an R&D Culture - Integrating CMMI and Agile Development - page 182

7.21 Agile Process Tailoring Guidance: Always Tailor Up

Process tailoring is one of most misunderstood and misused areas of the
CMMI model. There continues to be a common misbelief about the CMMI
and tailoring.

MYTH The CMMI requires a tailoring down approach.

In 2009, I continued to hear this myth being propagated even by some CMMI
Lead appraisers. It is true that to achieve CMMI level 3 you do need tailoring
guidelines and you do need to follow those guidelines to tailor the organiza-
tional standard processes to address the unique needs of each project. The
CMMI Organizational Process Definition (OPD) Process Area SP 1.3 does
expect each organization to:

Establish and maintain the tailoring criteria and guidelines for the organiza-
tion's set of standard processes.
However, the CMMI does not dictate what an organization needs to put into
its own tailoring guidelines. You can decide to tailor up, or tailor down. This
is up to each organization to decide based on its own business needs. You
just need to state your approach in your guidelines and then follow it. While
it is up to each organization to decide, I do have a strong recommendation on
which approach is best especially for Agile organizations, or organizations
that would like to increase their agility.

LESSON 4
Always tailor up if you want to increase control on your project, simplify your
planning/ tailoring process, and run projects with appropriate agility, effi-
ciency, and discipline.

My tailoring recommendations make sense for organizations that want to
increase their agility or maintain their current agility. When we make projects
tailor down, we are starting from the supposition that most projects need
everything. This assumes large and complex as the starting point and puts the
greatest onus of effort on small projects to explicitly tailor out. I believe this is
backward, especially for organizations using an Agile approach. We should
define the minimum everyone must do , and then tailor up as necessary.