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Gather and Inspect All Your Document Types

What you’ll need to look for is whatever document requirements you have missed before. Ask yourself, “What am I missing?” Particularly, are there any documents that you haven’t thought of? Are there any standards or customers or their computers that you haven’t thought of?

Up until now, you’ve looked at your documents casually. Now it’s time to get serious. Where you’ve generalized before, now you’ll want to be specific.

The following steps can help you to analyze your documents:

1.  Put all your sample documents on a table. Your table will be full of binders, folders, periodicals, loose sheets of paper, and perhaps CD-ROMs and floppy disks—all your publications. You might even set up a CRT on your table to display documents through a Web browser. If you want to represent an electronic document, you might just print out a page from one.
2.  Spread all your document identification forms out on a large table (your document identification forms may look like figure 6.2). Tape them to the documents on the table like a nametag so they are both plainly visible.
3.  Review your standards, customer, and tools forms. Lay them out where you can see them, either on the table or on the floor.
4.  Have everybody walk around the table with a large pad of Post-It notes. When anyone sees a form that doesn’t seem right, he or she writes up a note on a Post-It note and puts it on that form. You might want to repeat this process as often as needed to get a good collection of Post-It notes on everything.
5.  Have everybody talk about the Post-It notes afterward. Put more Post-It notes on forms or documents if they require further discussion or a solution to a problem must be postponed. After everyone is satisfied that each note has been discussed, put a check mark on it and remove it. You should have no remaining notes visible when this step is completed.

Tip:  
If someone needs to use the conference room before you get done with this whole project, use a camera to take pictures of how everything was spread out.

Choose Names for All Your Different Types of Documents

So far, you’ve been operating with names you may have been less than satisfied with. You improvised names on all your document type forms (refer to fig. 6.2). Now it’s time to decide what to call your documents.

From the last step, you should still have examples of each of your documents in the room with you. And each of those documents should have a document identification form stuck to it. Hopefully, you have worked through all of your Post-It notes (it’s okay if you haven’t, but you really should before you move too much farther).

If you have room, have everyone sit down, pick up a document form, and discuss it as a group. Decide if the name you have come up with works for everyone. As you change any names, simply make that change on the forms themselves.

Note:  
This doesn’t need to be a long step. Just change any names that don’t seem to fit and move on. You just want to make sure that all the names you’ve chosen are something you’re willing to live with. They have to make sense and be unique.

For example, if you have two types of service bulletins, one for field service personnel and another for customer service personnel, you don’t want to use the same name for each.

Anticipating Document Evolution

Imagine your dream house in five to ten years. Will you add a Jacuzzi or some tennis courts? How about some horse stables? Sure you may want to build them right from the start, but you have to draw the line somewhere. You can’t fit it all in at once. The same is true of your SGML environment. Fortunately, SGML is flexible, so you have room to grow later.

Some of the following questions can help you predict changes in your document environment:

•  Are there any types of documents you have left out or any types you should delete because of duplication, or some other reason?
•  Are there any types of documents that will become obsolete in the near future?
•  Are there any new types of documents on the horizon that you will need to incorporate in your collection?
•  Will your industry make any changes that will affect the type of data your documents must cover? For example, will you need to incorporate configuration management into your database? Will you need to change the way you identify security classification? Will old documents be converted to hypertext documents?
•  How will changes in technology over the next few years affect the scope of data your documents cover? For example, will new technologies force you to add new sort fields to your databases?
•  Will any standards or policies you currently use become obsolete or revised? What changes might these make to your documents?
•  What aspects of your documents would you like to leave open because you can’t fully anticipate all the relevant changes?
•  Will your customers’ change of tools affect how you make your documents? What new tools could cause you to change the way you currently structure your documents, thereby changing your environment?
•  Do you anticipate the character of your customer base to change over the next few years? That is, will your “typical customer” change in any way that will affect how he uses your information or how you must prepare it for him?
•  After considering all of the above questions, are there any other issues that will affect how any of your documents are structured? Will the building blocks that make up each of your documents change to fit any of the issues raised up until now?
•  What areas do you not feel confident in that you have fully defined?

If you’re sure you’ve remembered or discovered all relevant aspects to your environment, here are some possibilities you may have overlooked:

•  Maybe some technical problem will arise that makes a vital database field inaccessible.
•  Perhaps there’s going to be some procedural change that will upset what you have done.
•  There might be some restructuring in your company that will reallocate 50 percent of all your customer base to some other department.
•  Maybe your legal department will say your documents can no longer contain any hardware dimensions because of some liability issue that makes it too costly.
•  Maybe the current administration will come out with some executive order that will eliminate (by embargo, say) your most profitable middle eastern clients and skew your entire document base.


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