Defining a cross-practice process is where you turn your attention to the process/lifecycle side of things. How should the tasks and/or activities (i.e., capability patterns) from the individual Practices "flow" together? Are there any activities that always appear together and in what order do they appear? Are there specific sets of activities that can be reused together in more course-grained flows? What does an overall lifecycle look like? Define cross-practice processes to reflect these decisions. Specifically, define capability patterns for sets of capability patterns that always appear together and can be reused in other capability patterns, and define delivery processes for overall lifecycles. Defining cross-practice processes defines an overall flow through the practices and validates that you have the right practice content with the right separation of concerns.

Perform the following steps to create a cross-practice process:

• If one does not exist, create a Publish Base plug-in to contain the new process. Roadmap: Customize an Existing Practice Configuration information on Publish Base plug-ins, see Concept: Practice Library Plug-In Types.
    
• Create a Publishable method configuration that includes the the necessary core plug-ins (include role and standard category definitions), the new Publish plug-in, the practices (including the desired practice role assignments), and any cross-practice processes you are interested in including in your cross-practice process (remember all processes must have a default configuration). For more information on the practice library configuration types, see Concept: Practice Library Configuration Types. For more information on defining configurations, see Guideline: Defining Method Configurations.
  
• Create the cross-practice process, specifying the new configuration as the default configuration. Assemble the cross-practice process using the method elements (tasks, capability patterns) from the Process Construction configuration, defining as many levels (i.e., nested activities) as are needed. In some cases, there may even be reference workflows from the individual practices that you can use for ideas for the process you are building. When assembling cross-practice processes, the processes that are used (i.e., the capability patterns that are applied) from the practices must be copied instead of extended so that the process descriptors are built using the default configuration for the cross-practice process. For information on assembling processes, see Guideline: Defining Processes.

In summary, practices provide the pieces parts (tasks and capability patterns) and may even provide some good process patterns e.g., reference workflows), but in the end, it is the person creating the a process that must decide the order and levels (the level of nesting of the activities) of the process, using any and all available method content elements and/or process patterns.