Reusability with Standards

In February this year I did a presentation for Teamstudio on Notes Best Practices. Part of that presentation covered standards, and I want to extend an idea on standards by making the following claim: "In the corporate IT world a standard amounts to an agreed upon solution to a recurring problem."

In the software world there is a lot of talk about reusing code. Well, this same thought can be extended (reused?) to go beyond just code. When you create a standard (rule, procedure etc.), you effectively create a solution to a recurring problem. Each time you implement or use that standard, you are taking all the thought & effort that went into creating the standard the first time and reusing it. Let me supply some examples...

* You develop a standard configuration for a Notes client install (or any other software package). Now you company's help desk has just one client install to work with. Every time new help desk people come on board they only have to learn how to support that one client install. Compare this to the situation where there are multiple client installs, each one slightly different.
* You create a standard for your Notes development: all projects must go into under the "Dev\Projects\ProjectName folder, where "ProjectName" is the name of the project. Thus all project files will be grouped in one place. Now, every time a new project is started there is no need to decide where to put the project: just follow the standard. If an old project suddenly needs work, you know exactly where to find it. Compare this to the situation where developers can put projects anywhere they want on a development server, and chaotic mess that results from this approach.


Now, I have often had people say to me "But with all these rules, standards, procedures etc. you are taking away our freedom to be creative". But reality is quite different: standards actually provide greater freedom to be creative. Why? Because standards solve the mundane, recurring problems and leave you free to be creative on the more interesting problems. Do you really want to solve the same problems again and again, or would you rather focus on new problems?

To sum up, creating standards to solve recurring problems and you have reused the effort of solving those problems the first time. While there is a cost to manage standards, the reusability component can lead to significant cost savings. Another benefit is that a standards driven environment is much simpler to manage (i.e. complexity is reduced), and tends to be significantly more reliable. Finally, standards free people from mundane problems, allowing them to focus on more interesting problems. And you though reusability applied only to code...?