| TSWeb Procedures Group Minutes, August 26, 2005 Present: Margaret Nichols, Jim Spear, Lois Purcell, Debra Warfield, Jim Alberts (chair). Jim A. provided a summary of his meeting with Karen Calhoun earlier in the week. He indicated Karen supported the idea he presented regarding distributive maintenance of technical services procedures. Jim A. also asked for comments on the "Flowchart for Procedure Conversion and Creation" that he had distributed to the group via e-mail prior to the meeting. The group thought that this first draft provided a good overview of the complexity of the task involved with creating a user friendly website for accessing LTS procedures. As we get further into the process, it will be modified. Jim A. mentioned that some of the sections of the chart will actually require their own separate flow charts. In particular, the Metadata and Taxonomy sections will require additional discussion in this regard. We discussed the difference between administrative procedures and conventional day-to-day workflow procedures. We will list procedures that potentially require administrative decisions and forward the list to the Senior Management Team. We also noted that the Technical Services Web Site, itself, has probably not been checked for link and content accuracy since about a year ago. It will be the responsibility of the TS Web group, as a whole, but not necessarily the Procedures group specifically, to run a current check of the site. Jim A. will speak with Nate about this. Margaret distributed copies of a document entitled "Copy Edits Required for Procedures." This document begins to deal with issues associated with the consistent appearance and use of language and acronyms. For example, now that the acronym, LTS, will be used to describe the entirety of Technical Services, how should we refer to individual units: as LTS-Olin or Olin-LTS? We also mentioned some other style related issues: 1. Should procedures be written in the voice of 2nd or 3rd person? 2. When describing a procedural step that involves an LTS individual, should the person be referred to by name or by job title? 3. To what extent must all procedures be structured in the same way. How should they be notated, with Roman numerals, letters, numbers, bullets, etc? When speaking about the procedures in general, we realized that we can divide them into at least 3 categories: 1) those that are primarily information but not procedures, per se; 2) those that are instructions that are directly followed from beginning to end -- generically a "do this, then do this" type; and 3) those that essentially contain procedures within procedures -- that is, they contain one or more decision points which result in "Yes/No" branches to other procedures. This division of procedure by category results in an added level of review and an added degree of complexity to some of the procedures. We agreed that one of the first procedures to update is CTS Procedure #3, "Procedure for Updating Procedures." We also agreed to make sure that at the end of each revised procedure we should include formal attribution information on the date of revision and the name of the person who did the revision. Discussions on the procedures involving metadata and taxonomy were tabled until the Sept. 2. meeting. For the next meeting, Jim A. indicated that each of us should choose one of the CTS procedures and review it to see if it can be improved upon and to make the appropriate edits. Minutes submitted by Jim Spear, 9/1/05 |