Elements of Guidance

Elements of Guidance

What is an Element of guidance? According to SVBR it is:

a “directive that is actionable, whose purpose is to advise or inform with a goal of resolving a problem or difficulty, especially as given by someone in authority”.
where
Directive is a “means that defines or constrains some aspect of an enterprise”
and
“‘Actionable’ means that a person who knows about the directive could observe a relevant situation (including his or her own behavior) and decide directly whether or not the business was complying with the directive.”

and according to SPEM2 it is:

“Guidance is a Process Element that provides additional information related to process elements such as Roles, Activities, and Work Products. The particular Guidance is classified with a guidance kind that indicates a specific type of guidance....”

Here is a list of key Elements of Guidance

Checklist A Checklist is a specific type of guidance that identifies a series of items that need to be completed or verified. Checklists are often used in reviews such as walkthroughs or inspections.

Concept A Concept is a specific type of guidance that outlines key ideas associated with basic principles underlying the referenced item. Concepts normally address more general topics than Guidelines and span across several work product and/or activities.

Estimate (metric kind) An Estimate is a specific type of Guidance that provides sizing measures, or standards for sizing the work effort associated with performing a particular piece of work and instructions for their successful use. It may be comprised of estimation considerations and estimation metrics.

Estimation Considerations (metric kind) Estimation Considerations qualify the usage and application of estimation metrics in the development of an actual estimate.

Estimating Metric (metric kind) Estimation Metric describes a metric or measure that is associated with an element and which is used to calculate the size of the work effort as well as a range of potential labor.

Example An Example is a specific type of Guidance that represents a typical, partially completed, sample instance of one or more work products or scenario like descriptions of how Task may be performed. Examples can be related to Work Products as well as Tasks that produce them as well as any other Content Element.

Guideline A Guideline is a specific type of guidance that provides additional detail on how to perform a particular activity or grouping of activities (e.g. grouped together as iterations) or that provides additional detail, rules, and recommendations on work products and their properties. Amongst others, it can include details about best practices and different approaches for doing work, how to use particular types of work products, information on different subtypes and variants of the work product and how they evolve throughout a lifecycle, discussions on skills the performing roles should acquire or improve upon, measurements for progress and maturity, etc.

Practice A Practice represents a proven way or strategy of doing work to achieve a goal that has a positive impact on work product or process quality. Practices are defined orthogonal to methods and processes. They could summarize aspects that impact many different parts of a method or specific processes. Examples for practices would be "Manage Risks", "Continuously verify quality", "Architecture-centric and component-based development", etc.

Report A Report is a predefined template of a result that is generated on the basis of other work products as an output from some form of tool automation. An example for a report would be a use case model survey, which is generated by extracting diagram information from a graphical model and textual information from documents and combines these two types of information into a report.

Reusable Asset A Reusable Asset provides a solution to a problem for a given context. The asset may have a variability point, which is a location in the asset that may have a value provided or customized by the asset consumer. The asset has rules for usage which are the instructions describing how the asset should be used.

Roadmap A Roadmap is a special Guidance Kind which is only related to Activates. A Roadmap represents a linear walkthrough of a Process. An instance of a Roadmap represents important documentation for the Activity or Process it is related to. Often a complex Activity such as a Process can be much easier understood by providing a walkthrough with a linear thread of a typical instantiation of this Activity. In addition to making the process practitioner understand how work in the process is being performed, a Roadmap provides additional information about how Activities and Tasks relate to each other over time. Roadmaps are also used to show how specific aspects are distributed over a whole process providing a kind of filter on the process for this information.

Supporting Material Supporting Materials is catch all for other types of guidance not specifically defined elsewhere. It can be related to all kinds of Process Elements, i.e. including other guidance elements.

Template A Template is a specific type of guidance that provides for a work product a predefined table of contents, sections, packages, and/or headings, a standardized format, as well as descriptions how the sections and packages are supposed to be used and completed. Templates cannot only be provided for documents, but also for conceptual models or physical data stores.

Term Definition Term Definitions define concepts and are used to build up the Glossary. They are not directly related to Process Elements, but their relationship is being derived when the Term is used in the Process Elements description text.

Tool Mentor A Tool Mentor is a specific type of guidance that shows how to use a specific tool to accomplish some piece of work a Work Product either in the context of or independent from an Activity.

Whitepaper Whitepapers are a special Concept guidance that has been externally reviewed or published and can be read and understood in isolation of other process elements and guidance.