Tailor the Project, Not the Standard of Accountability

The purpose of tailoring is not to remove discipline; it is to apply the right discipline to the problem being solved.

Two organisations can fail for opposite reasons.

One imposes the same methodology on every initiative. A low-risk repeatable project receives the same documentation, approvals and control intensity as a safety-critical transformation. Teams spend effort satisfying process that adds little decision value.

The other organisation reacts by declaring itself flexible. Documents disappear, governance becomes informal, assumptions are rarely recorded and changes are justified after the fact. Speed improves briefly, but decision quality and accountability deteriorate.

Both organisations misunderstand tailoring.

The Strategic Context

The supplied study notes make the central point clearly: one size does not fit all. They draw on Burgan and Burgan's 2014 PMI conference paper to argue that project-management processes, tools and techniques should be adapted to the nature and characteristics of the project rather than applied uniformly.

The material illustrates three broad responses.

A plan-driven approach is appropriate when risk, regulation, business loss or potential harm justify extensive planning, monitoring and control. A change-driven approach is more appropriate where requirements and scope cannot be fully defined in advance and value can be delivered incrementally. A time-driven approach can suit highly time-sensitive or repeatable work where only essential component processes may be required.

The important idea is not the labels. It is contingency: the management system should fit the decision environment.

Silvius's review of project-management schools reaches a similar conceptual point when describing the contingency school: projects differ, so management processes need to be adapted to their specific characteristics.

What Leaders Commonly Misread

The first misread is that tailoring means “using less”. Sometimes the correct tailored response is more governance, more evidence and more formal control. A regulated infrastructure change and an internal prototype should not receive equal treatment.

The second misread is that agile or change-driven work is unplanned work. Flexibility does not remove the need for objectives, priorities, decision rights, risk management or evidence. It changes the horizon and granularity of planning.

The third misread is that standardisation is inherently bureaucratic. Standards create common language, repeatability and governance. The problem appears when standardisation is detached from context and process becomes an end in itself.

The fourth misread is focusing only on methodology. Tailoring should also consider governance cadence, documentation, technical assurance, stakeholder engagement, commercial model, reporting, change control and the amount of optionality retained.

Reframing the Issue

Instead of asking, “Which methodology should this project use?”, leaders should ask:

What must this management system make visible, controllable and learnable given the consequences of being wrong?

This reframes methodology as a design problem.

If failure could cause serious safety, legal or financial consequences, the system should emphasise verification, traceability, assurance and controlled change. If the main uncertainty is what customers will value, the system should emphasise experimentation, feedback and reversible decisions. If time is dominant and work is familiar, the system should minimise non-essential overhead while protecting critical controls.

Tailoring is therefore the architecture of accountability around a specific problem.

Strategic Analysis: What Should Be Tailored?

Governance intensity

Decision rights should be proportional to consequence and uncertainty. Not every variation needs executive approval, but material changes to investment logic, safety, scope, benefits or risk exposure should have clear escalation thresholds.

Planning horizon

Stable work can support longer detailed horizons. Uncertain work needs rolling-wave planning and regular revalidation of assumptions. The shorter horizon is not evidence of weak management; it can be the rational response to incomplete knowledge.

Evidence and assurance

Evidence requirements should reflect what must be proven. A new manufacturing process may require capability studies, safety validation and production trials. A digital service may require user adoption evidence, security testing and operational readiness. The assurance question is always: what could we mistakenly believe if we do not test this?

Change control

In a plan-driven environment, deviations from baseline may require formal assessment because the baseline is meaningful and interfaces are tightly coupled. In an exploratory environment, change may be expected, but the business objective, investment limits and decision principles still require protection.

Stakeholder engagement

The source material's movement from a “hard” to a “soft” perspective is useful when interpreted as an expansion, not a replacement. Engineering logic, schedule and cost remain necessary. So do human interaction, organisational change and stakeholder expectations. Tailoring determines the balance.

Reporting cadence

Monthly reporting can be excessive for a small routine activity and far too slow for a volatile critical program. The reporting cycle should be set by the speed at which meaningful conditions can change and the lead time required to act.

Decision Framework

A simple tailoring matrix can prevent methodology from becoming a matter of personal preference.

This matrix should not produce an automatic methodology. It should generate a design conversation.

For each project, leaders should explicitly decide:

1. which controls are mandatory;
2. which controls can be simplified;
3. which decisions require independent assurance;
4. how often the business case will be revisited;
5. where experimentation is allowed;
6. what cannot be changed without escalation.

The outcome should be a short delivery governance profile, not a generic declaration that the project is “agile” or “waterfall”.

Related article: Context Comes Before Control: Why Project Decisions Begin Outside the Project

From Strategy to Execution

Immediately, stop using project size as the main proxy for governance intensity. Size matters, but risk, novelty, reversibility, regulation and stakeholder complexity may matter more.

Over the medium term, create a small set of organisational tailoring patterns rather than one universal methodology. For example, patterns might cover regulated capital work, product innovation, internal process improvement and repeatable deployment. Each pattern can define minimum controls while allowing further adaptation.

Over the long term, measure whether governance is producing better decisions rather than more compliance activity. Useful evidence includes decision cycle time, late discovery of assumptions, rework caused by weak requirements, avoidable escalation, benefit erosion and assurance findings.

The organisation should also train leaders to explain why controls exist. When teams understand the decision purpose behind a process, they are more capable of adapting it intelligently without removing what protects the enterprise.

Tailoring decisions themselves should be reviewable. A project may begin with uncertain requirements and later stabilise, or begin as routine work and encounter a regulatory or technical complication. The governance profile should therefore be revisited at material transition points. The objective is not continual administrative change; it is to ensure that the control system remains proportionate to the current problem rather than the problem as it was understood months earlier.

Signals to Monitor

Tailoring is failing when:

• every initiative produces the same artefacts regardless of context;
• teams routinely bypass governance because it is too slow;
• “agile” is used to justify weak documentation or unclear accountability;
• safety, compliance or commercial obligations are discovered late;
• project managers cannot explain why a particular control is required;
• decision makers receive large reports but little usable evidence;
• excessive change control suppresses necessary learning;
• repeated rework suggests the chosen planning horizon is unrealistic.

A particularly important signal is when methodology debates consume more energy than the business problem.

Questions for the Leadership Team

1. Which project characteristics should determine our level of control?
2. What is the consequence if our current assumptions are wrong?
3. Which governance activities genuinely improve decisions, and which mainly demonstrate compliance?
4. Where do we need more experimentation, and where do we need more assurance?
5. Are our planning and reporting cycles matched to the speed of change?
6. Which controls are enterprise minimums regardless of delivery approach?
7. Can the project team explain the rationale for its tailored governance model in one page?

References

Burgan, SC & Burgan, DS 2014, One size does not fit all: Choosing the right project approach, paper presented at PMI Global Congress 2014, Project Management Institute, Newtown Square, PA.

Silvius, G 2017, ‘Sustainability as a new school of thought in project management’, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 166, pp. 1479–1493.

Closing Perspective

The strongest project organisations are neither rigid nor casual. They are deliberate.

They standardise the principles that protect enterprise interests and tailor the practices used to apply them. That distinction allows teams to move quickly where speed is valuable, add assurance where consequence is high, and change direction where learning matters. The project should fit the environment. Accountability should remain clear in every environment.

About EraNorth Insights
EraNorth Insights publishes practical analysis on strategy, projects, operations, transformation and decision intelligence for professional and organisational use. About EraNorth.

Copy link Print