Document Naming Convention

[James Barrow]

Apparently I didn't know that I was actually a project manager since I'm now
leading the charge in rebuilding our document repository (Sharepoint).

Chapter 37: Indiana Jones and the Artifact Typed

The PMO asked me to come up with a document naming convention.  I did.  And
I'll give you a little background information first:

- Our organization has a high turnover rate, mostly due to the contractors
we hire.
- We're going to use all of Sharepoint's features, including the versioning.
- I've previously given the PMO a core set of documents that will most
likely be used for all future projects (requirements, use cases, test plan,
etc.).

The naming convention that I came up with is as follows.  I really want to
know what others are using:

DEV-PROr1-TheTitleOfTheDocument-BUC

The first part of the naming convention is the name of the department that
the document applies to (DEV=Development, BUS=Business Integration, etc.).
This has met the most resistance, but my justification is that a) people
come and go, but departments are static.

The second part is the name of the project with release number
(PROJECTrelease 1, etc.).  We only have one major project at the moment.

The third is the full name of the document (the name of the document is
often vastly different from the type of document).

The last part is the type of document (BUC=Business Use Case, FRQ=Functional
Requirements, etc.).

The quick and dirty is this.  If I were a new hire and was told to look on
the Sharepoint site for Engineering's technical specifications, narrowing
the search results down to Engineering's would be a good search criteria to
start with.

Once I wrote the naming convention, I also wrote the document
creation/document change process.  This met with some resistance because a
few people want to call these "Artifact Creation" and "Artifact Change"
processes.  Artifacts?

- Jim