(1) Yes, we are going to release the Method Authoring Method (MAM) as a download for customers soon (I will announce it here in the blog, once it comes online). This is a method framework that our team created to document exactly what you are asking for: our practices for designing, managing, and authoring method content and processes with RMC. It has a particular focus on the Practices library that ships with 7.5 as it represent the current reference architecture that we also recommend to clients for their own content. Actually, if you follow the design guidelines described there you would be able to easily combine your content with content from any of the practices that we ship.

(2) I agree with you. This is one of the downsides working in a large organization such as IBM: some design decisions for shared components are not made by the product teams. Hence, we had to live with the way RAM contributes its content. I actually filed this as a defect against the RAM client, as it really a supplementary tool that should not take over the online help like that. I hope this can be fixed in the near future. Same with the Glossary. It was an IBM mandate that we had to link to the global IBM glossary and add our terms to it there. Of course, with a 300k organization like IBM you get a very large corporate glossary and you now have to sift through hundreds of terms that you are not interested in. I do not understand the rationale behind that decision myself, but this is just my personal view on this.

I am EmeriCon’s Chief Methodologist and have only recently used RMC to better document our methodologies. I have enjoyed browsing through your blog, which provides very helpful and very insightful information for a beginner like me.

I have two questions/comments for you:
1. Do you have any documentation, white papers, forum threads that discuss “best practices” on how to structure your method plug-ins? For example, what should be the granularity of tasks, activities, and processes? What are recommended ways to structure plug-ins, to allow a lot of reuse at a “base” plug-in level?

2. I started using RMC 7.5 today after having worked in RMC 7.2 for a few weeks. I am a little concerned about the Help section. It seems that an awful lot of RAM information is included and it seems to confuse me. The RMC 7.2 Help included a very useful Glossary, which seems to have been removed from 7.5. Do you have any idea where it went?

Thank you again for sharing your knowledge with the RMC user community.

Marc

Thanks for linking it here Peter. Otherwise I would have probably overlooked it in the infinite widths of the developerWorks.

@Joe: Don’t worry. I have neither a Ph.D. nor years of IBM Rational experience, but after a while of just using RMC, I got the hang of it.

Just a quick comment to tell you that I’ve found the tutorial very interesting and well explained. After following all the steps, I’ve been able to deploy our organization process into our Jazz/RTC instance. Much better than the Jazz process editor. Nice work.

Thanks!