Tailoring overview

Tailoring describes how existing method content and processes are customized to fit the needs of a real-world project.

A tailoring session is typically performed at the beginning of a project by the project manager. Other project team members such as the lead architect or development leader may participate in the process to ensure the tailored process suits the specific circumstances and team requirements of the project.

Tailoring can be summarized as follows:

In tailoring, a session can be created as a container for a customized process.
Tailoring creates a customized process that fits the needs of a particular project.
Processes can be customized by adding, deleting, suppressing, un-suppressing activities, tasks, roles, and work products.
Tailoring changes are stored as part of a tailoring session and do not modify the original content used to create that session.
The tailored delivery process can be exported as a project plan template to either IBM® Rational® Portfolio Manager or Microsoft Project.
The tailored delivery process or session can be imported as a part of the current library.

Starting a tailoring session

The starting point of a tailoring session is to select a process that will be copied into your session. There are several sources for the base process:

You can start with one of the processes included with Engineering Method Composer such as one of the different RUP delivery process variants.
You can use a process that you downloaded from IBM developerWorks® or an IBM partner.
You can start with a process that is provided by your organization or team members. This could be the case to ensure a consistent project approach for the whole organization, define milestones for controlling purposes or at least provide common templates.

Tailoring perspective user interface

The Tailoring perspective provides the necessary views and functions which are required to customize the process while hiding information only required for authoring. There are three primary views in the tailoring perspective:

The Tailoring Session view presents a list of the available tailoring sessions with a list of processes that have been created for that session.
The Available Elements view provides a hierarchical view of all elements such as work products, roles and tasks which can be used during the selected tailoring session.
The Tailoring Process Editor provides the primary means of viewing and customizing the tailored process from other available breakdown structures that are accessed from the different tabs as well as displaying the details of individually selected elements.

Typical usage scenario

A typical usage scenario involves a Project Manager who wants to create a customized version of a delivery process. At a high level, the steps a Project Manager would take are as follows:

Use the tailoring wizard to create a session and process.
Add additional content not included in original process (optional).
Suppress unnecessary elements.
Create new elements to fill identified gaps.
Make any required changes to the process structure.
Publish and export the resulting process to a planning tool.

The image below shows a typical tailoring session. The “new_tailoring_process” has been opened with the tailoring editor, which is the main tool for customizing a process. The tailoring editor presents a simplified view based on the other existing editors that adds special tailoring functions and hides functions that are not needed for tailoring.

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