I had a very good question from a friend of mine using the Electric Utilities PCF in her organization and I wanted to share it with you.   She realized that the latest version of the Electric Utilities PCF differed from the latest version of the Cross Industry PCF and she wanted to know if she could customize her organization's version of the EU PCF to include the components of the Cross Industry PCF that she felt were missing for her organization's adoption of the PCF.   The short answer here is yes - you can add process elements from the Cross Industry - or from any industry framework for that matter - to your organization's instance of the PCF. The issues you have to contend with are two of the basic PCF business rules:  

• MECE - mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and
• Traceability - if you move something, you've altered the definition of the parent

  For MECE - this is an easy principle to enforce or review - just make sure that you're not repeating yourself. The PCF does not imply any kind of order or relationship between the elements of the process elements, other than the parent-child relationship that defines the process elements. Just be complete and thorough and make sure that what you're adding doesn't overlap with anything else.   For Traceability - this one is more subjective and requires a bit of out of the box thinking. The main intent here is to ensure that you're keeping the ability to compare a process in an apples-to-apples fashion. The scientific approach is seldom the right approach here.   If you remove a significant portion of the process element's definition and put it under a sibling process element, then you've altered the constitution of both of the elements of that framework and you will no longer be able to benchmark or compare the processes which were changed. This is not a hard and fast rule however - there are some moves that can be made without materially altering the process element: for example we removed a large section from the IT category that dealt with procurement. Based on the feedback of our subject matter experts, we determined that this procurement process group within IT (it was 7.1.8 in version 5.0.0) was violating the MECE principle and needed to be removed. We did not change the scope of the overall IT category however even as we removed a significant portion of the work from the category. Why? Because the work was already defined in the PCF elsewhere and would have already been attributed to THAT process element (in category 4) rather than this one during any benchmarking activities.   Traceability also helps to enforce consistency. Keeping track of the source of the items as you edit files, which five-digit identifiers were impacted or affected, etc. - these are all critical steps in adapting a PCF that will help you in the long run. Keep these documents handy! You will wish you had them within minutes of publishing the framework when you field your first question from a practitioner or someone trying to use the framework.   In general, the best approach to customizing the PCF is to keep the simple few high priority rules of the PCF in mind: MECE, hierarchical functional decomposition (this is a subject for another post!), and traceability.   We're here for you if you have any questions - so just comment below or contact us directly.