Project process

[Sara Jahan]

Hi,

I have been asked by a friend to formulate process documents (including templates) for his company. This company was very small and has suddenly grown in size in terms of both number of employees as well as number of projects.

Where can I find info to write such documents? I have so far been an end user of these docs.

Sara

[Lasse Koskela]

I can't help you by providing such templates but I would be interested to hear more about the growth of this company you're talking about -- specifically, how many developers they have, how many simultaneous projects they have, and how big teams those projects have?

When someone asks for document templates, I tend to try to first talk them out of as many documents as possible and then offer the simplest template as possible to start with.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Sara Jahan:
I have been asked by a friend to formulate process documents (including templates) for his company. This company was very small and has suddenly grown in size in terms of both number of employees as well as number of projects.

What specific problems are they trying to fix?

[Stan James]

The main problem I've seen solved by doc templates and mandatory process is helping people outside the project understand what you're doing. In big shops you may have to interact with many different organizations - server planning, network planning, database management, enterprise architecture, deployment, production support, etc. A checklist of who to talk to and when can be a good thing. I saw one outsourced project code-complete, paid for, tested and ready to deploy and the production folks refused to have some of the software components deployed to their world. Somebody should have asked a little earlier if we use Cold Fusion here.

But you need some oversite on this kinda thing or you'll have ten different groups asking for the same information in different templates. I've started copying the templates to Wiki pages with links to the single golden source of the information. And avoid the urge to make all the templates look great with fancy cover pages, company logos, table of contents, revision history. I get too many docs with 4 pages of waste in front of the content.

Browse Scott Ambler's AgileModeling.com. He has a good philosophy of doing just what needs done and you'll likely find some common sense ideas you can use there.

[Scott Ambler]

We have a few templates posted at http://www.ronin-intl.com/downloads/ that you're welcome to download and modify for your own specific use.

- Scott