In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a rogue smith and bandit who invited travellers to rest in his “perfectly sized bed.” When they accepted, he forcibly bound them to it, then stretched them or cut off various body parts until they “perfectly” fit the bed.
Too many organizations have a single model of standard practice to which they try to fit all their projects. Development and acquisition organizations are finding that competitive success requires diverse systems that are a mix of high security assurance components, opaque and dynamic COTS products and cloud services, highly useful but kaleidoscopic apps and widgets, and further success-critical developed or outsourced capabilities. Approaching such systems with a one-size-fits-all process approach often results in painful Procrustean outcomes.
The incremental Commitment Spiral Model (ICSM) is not a one-size-fits-all process approach, but a process generator that enables an organization to determine and evolve the best-fit process for each project based on its primary opportunities and risks. It uses some diagrams to provide some helpful process views, but is primarily driven by four key principles that largely overlap with Lean principles.
The presentation will summarize the problems of Procrustean one-size-fits-all process approaches, present the ICSM principles and process views, and provide examples of projects that illustrate the results of following or disregarding the principles.
