From the course: Project Management Foundations

Tailor your approach to meet project and organizational needs

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Tailor your approach to meet project and organizational needs

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- [Educator] Project management approach, governance, and processes aren't one-size-fits-all. What makes sense for a critical, complex multi-year project would overwhelm a simple one-month endeavor. What factors do you consider when determining how to tailor your approach? Project size, duration, and complexity are key factors. You want to make sure that your approach includes activities needed for effective project management without wasting time and money on more processes than necessary. You also want to take into account the industry and culture of the organization. For example, you might have to follow certain approaches in a highly regulated industry, or your organization may require that you follow a specific methodology. Approach and lifecycle are two examples of tailoring. Is your project better suited to waterfall, Agile, incremental, or a combination of approaches? For example, building construction might use waterfall, while developing a new web-based service might use Agile. You might tailor your processes as well. For instance, you could add processes to support regulatory requirements, or you might eliminate some monitoring and control processes for a small, high performing team. Engagement is another area where tailoring comes into play. If your project is critical to the organization and has a tight deadline, it makes sense to assign experienced people to the team. You can also choose different levels of empowerment. With an experienced team, you might delegate decision-making to the team, or in a hierarchical organization with inexperienced team members, you could opt to provide more guidance. When your project includes internal and external resources, such as vendors and contractors, tailoring is needed to integrate everyone into a single effective project team that can deliver project outcomes. The software and hardware that you use is yet another form of tailoring. For example, if you're working on Agile projects, software that supports Agile development should be tailored to your environment. Finally, you might tailor the methods, documents, templates, and other artifacts you use. That's a quick overview of the various ways you can tailor your project management efforts to build an effective environment for project delivery.

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