Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7.22 Tailoring Down—The Wrong Approach but Used in
Many Organizations
What I see in most large “high maturity organizations” today is a tailor
down approach. This approach requires people to expend effort explaining
why something is not needed.
This adds the greatest amount of work for the simplest programs, which is
not an Agile-friendly approach.
7.23 Why Tailoring Up Makes Sense
When you tailor down, how far can you go? Is there a minimum defined? I
have found this is often a gray area in many large organizations, and allows
large projects to get in trouble through abuse. If you start at a
minimum
set
where the minimum set is what everyone “must do,” you
eliminate the risk
of
“tailoring out” a “must do.” This is why I say that starting with the “must do's”
helps you control your project.
LESSON 5
A tailoring up approach is consistent with Agile approaches, and com-
pletely CMMI compliant.
7.24 Will Tailoring Up
8
Solve All Your Tailoring Issues?
At GEAR, I heard complaints that during the planning/tailoring phase on
some projects, agreements had been reached to produce certain artifacts that
no one used. These artifacts were placed in the artifact spreadsheet using a
tailoring up approach.
So I asked:
How do you decide what artifacts to produce on a given project when you are
tailoring up?
8. The goal of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM), https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloper-
works/blogs/ambler/?lang=en, is to help people understand the context in which they are applying
Agile approaches. If you don't understand the context, you have little hope of tailoring effectively.
