Creating a Customized Guidance Repository

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As a consultant part of my job is to provide guidance to our customers on the best way to use our technology, namely in terms of application development practices. Over time, you start to better understand the type of customer you’re working with, what works, what doesn’t and you start to optimize your own delivery processes. You reuse material and refine it the next time around. That’s the nature of our work in the Services organization.

Lately I’ve been involved in several engagements in the Application Platform Optimization space, mainly the Application Lifecycle Management suite of Offerings.

At the present I’m working with one customer who has gone through the Assessment phase and we’ve arrived at a six phases maturity growth roadmap that they’re starting to implement. One of the key aspects of this type of custom engagement is that all the experience gained by the customer and all the guidance delivered by the consulting team, should be persisted by the customer. We’re working with a small team within the customer and they are the ones who will have the responsibility of creating their own guidance and internal best practices and sharing all this information with the rest of the organization. So to collect, persist, distribute and, later on, update their in-house customized guidance for application architecture, development and lifecycle management, we’ve chosen to use the Guidance Explorer tool available on Codeplex.

The use of this tool turned out to be a great fit for this scenario. Instead of compiling one giant document, that would go through several versions and would quickly fall out of synch, the customer is now publishing and updating guidance, based on an existing database of industry and technology best practices. Guidance articles have their own metadata, the lifecycle of each piece of guidance is independent of each other and, if needed, all the guidance can be compiled into a Word document for a hardcopy reference. Additionally, one of my favorite features is the ability to subscribe to the guidance through a published RSS feed and receive a notification whenever guidance changes or a new best practice is published.

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