Categories: Business Analysis
As you’ve likely heard, the SME review is complete for PMI’s business analysis standard and we will soon be in the public review stage. With that we want to share a little more of what you’ll find under the covers. We have included a variety of helpful things in our attempt to come up with a product that is friendly to the adaptive, predictive, and the “anywhere in between” members of the community. One of the critical constructs we created to address this very topic is what we on the team colloquially call “the tailoring tables”.
Let me back up a moment and explain that for each of the processes, we certainly try to explain in text how the process might vary depending on whether you use an adaptive or predictive life cycle on the project, program, or portfolio. However, we wanted to also offer a tool for readers to quickly summarize the essence of how each process might vary, so it’s not buried in text – that tool is the set of tailoring tables. Within the guide, these tables describe three common aspects of how business analysis could be tailored based on your selected project life cycle:
- Process Name – what the process is called can vary
- Approach – how or timing of when you perform the process might vary
- Deliverables – the things you produce when performing the process might vary
Every process includes a table describing how the process is commonly tailored with regards to the topics above for adaptive versus predictive life cycles.
One key phrase in that previous sentence is “commonly,” which means this content is not a rule or policy, but rather a guideline. For example, if we said that in adaptive life cycles, requirements are typically represented in user story format, and your organization has reason to write them in use cases instead, then by all means you should produce use cases. Similarly, there is nothing in this guide indicating that user stories cannot also be used in predictive life cycles, even though we don’t explicitly say they can. I mention this because this is probably the most prevalent feedback we got about these tables. Some of the SME reviewers felt like the predictive tailoring suggestions might be helpful in an adaptive project or vice versa. We agree! We just had to also offer something more useful than saying “you can do anything in any life cycle” so we reflected on common practice and used the reviewer feedback to help tweak what we missed.
Here is an example of what this table might look like for the Define and Elaborate Requirements process.
©2017, Project Management Institute, Inc.
That is “tailoring tables” in a nutshell. Whether you love or hate them, we welcome your feedback. You can formally (or informally!!) share your thoughts in the public review process of course, too.
