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Working Group - Mary Lee Kennedy (co-chair), Tony Byrne (co-chair), Erik Hartman, Jane McConnell, John O'Donovan, Brendan Quinn, Ann Rockley, James Robertson, Bill Trippe, Lisa Welchman, Bob Doyle
Process for Practices Selection (Board Meeting, August 11)
We would like to ballot the current membership on priorities for Good Practices research areas. We will ask members to vote for their top 10 areas, of which 5 will become sessions at the CM Summit.
Of course a Summit session depends on our arriving at a draft recommended practice, so we will also call for working group participants. If their Practice is chosen, the working group participants will decide who leads the session at the Summit.
Before we ask for your preferences, we want you to review the current draft list of Practice areas, and suggest others for inclusion before we ballot.
The list of practice areas is at http://www.cmprosold.org/Resources/Practices/index.html
The discussion of the Practices Working Group are at http://www.cmprosold.org > Resources > Practices
That group has aleady begun work on four practice areas, and if no one wants to replace them with others, these will be the sessions at the CM Summit. They are:
The above links are to Design Patterns with structured Placeholder text to be replaced by the working groups. We have chunked the Practice recommendations to make them suitable for reuse as XML blocks of content.
There is considerable controversy over whether Design Patterns are an appropriate formalism to use for reporting our recommended practices. This was Tony Byrne's original suggestion, and James Robertson was initially enthusiastic. But now James says we need to demonstrate its suitability in each case. Others argue strongly against it and think "templates" might be more useful, because of all the hype about patterns and because patterns have become a buzzword.
Please look at the template, which includes research and recommended practice for Design Patterns themselves. It now includes a section for Contributor credits.
/Resources/Practices/Template.html
Suggested working group procedure (Jane McConnell, August 10)
The process of sharing ideas on a subject and the process of building good practice guidelines is not the same. The first can be unstructured, with comments coming at all times from all directions, including people just arriving in the discussion. In fact, the more the better I'd say.
The second needs a more structured albeit flexible process, as it is actually a project being carried out by a virtual team with deliverables at the end. Obviously, the deliverables are "temporary", a takeoff point hopefully leading to second and third rounds, or a number of variations or more specific work based on specific situations.
One difficulty for the team working towards deliverables and trying to meet a timeline is to have new arrivals come in with brand new suggestions as to how to approach the subject, or what format to use. These comments are valuable and should be integrated, but not continually along the process. Otherwise the team will never reach a deliverable.
My suggestion: A team working on a given practice could work together for a pre-defined time period, then publish the results of their work for participation and comments by the larger group or community. There would then be a concrete takeoff point for comments, modifications, improvements, ...whatever vetting and further development process we put into place. The on-going work can be made available to all members as it is being developed, of course, but in "read only" mode.
New arrivals who want to participate in the work would be welcome to join the team, via the leader, who would help them integrate into the on-going work, and move the core work forward.
My opinion is that we should make our first deadline end October (KMWorld, where a number of us can have a face-to-face work session), look at the material we have, and propose a vetting and further development process. The CM Summit end November can be our "publish for comments" target deadline for the 4 subjects we have set into motion as well as the moment to launch the vetting and further development activities.
The challenge for us as a group is to get beyond the good ideas, of which we have plenty, and get some accomplishments done. I think part of the answer lies in striking the right balance between structure and autonomy.
Second Good Practices Meeting: Tuesday, July 20, 2004 1PM ET Meeting Audio
Attending - Mary Lee Kennedy (co-chair), Tony Byrne (co-chair), Jane McConnell, Ann Rockley, Bob Doyle
Meeting notes (Mary Lee Kennedy)
The team decided to focus on three good practices first. All practices will be named in actionable terms, starting with a verb. We do not have naming conventions yet but agreed that will occur as we work through the first set of practices. The first practices are:
Over the next two weeks the Committee will informally share information on good practices. This material will be exchanged in email, or if possible, shared in a secure collaborative environment. Bob Doyle will check and let us know about the ability to ensure our information is secure. Aside from security, we will need a place on the web where we can edit, manage versions, and upload files.
Our interim process for good practices will be:
Our goal is to have draft good practices to share at the CM Summit. This will be an opportunity for vetting and amending.
We are still not clear on what it means to ?vote? on a proven good practice. This will likely become clear as we work through the process.
The next meeting will be held in two weeks. At that time someone will take responsibility for leading each of the good practices. Please note it is unlikely I will be in attendance. (Mary Lee)
Actions
First Telephone Meeting - May 14, 2004 attending Tony Byrne, Ann Rockley, Mary Lee Kennedy (joint meeting with Models and Design Patterns Committee)
Agreement was reached on the following two points.
Point 1. Different or the Same: Good Practices Committee and Models and Design Patterns Committee
It was agreed that there is a need for both committees. The Good Practices Committee (note use of word ?good? vs. ?best?) is focused on discipline-specific practices (e.g. content lifecycle management) with the goal of stating objective truths. The Models and Design Committee tries to identify broader models and designs or frameworks in which the CM professionals work (e.g. complexity models, maturity models), with the goal of outlining canonical alternatives and approaches.
Naturally, there will be areas of overlap. The Good Practices committee may fail to get agreement on a universal recommendation and remand further analysis to the Models and Patterns Committee. The Models and Patterns Committee may reach consensus on universally-good practices after analyzing alternative models and suggest a statement for consideration by the Good Practices committee.
In general, though, the first committee is more prescriptive, the latter committee more descriptive.
Both committees will follow almost an identical process in their formulation with the potential for joint priority setting in areas where it makes sense.
Ann Rockley and Tony Byrne will be the liaisons between the two committees.
Point 2. Deliverables for the Committees
Recommended Roadmap Elements:
1. Norms for behavior in working groups and member discussions
2) Association imprimatur
The idea here is that the association should not publish anything official (i.e. beyond the wiki) without going through some sort of open, participatory member-review process.
This message is going out to everyone who signed up for the G23 Practices or Models Committees.
As co-chairs, Ann Rockley, Mary Lee Kennedy, and I convened intermittently over the last month to try to give some structure to these 2 committees. We came up with a joint working document for your review, debate, emendation, and ultimate vote.
Let's try to have our discussion around it via the Web, though, rather than by e-mail. Bob D., perhaps you can put this on the Web in whatever format we are using for the other Committees? [Done. This is the page. RFC Comments can be added via the Comments link below.]
Main thrust of our talks to date:
