Jul
31
Volunteering for the BoK
July 31, 2006 |
Since I’ve had several people ask me about this, I thought I’d post an update on what kind of volunteer opportunities exist.
First of all, I have to tell you that we don’t have a lot of volunteer opportunities at this time. The BoK team is presently focusing on the editing and integration of existing content, and not on the creation of new content. Only two of the subcommittees have significant amounts of content left to develop (Solution Assessment and Validation and BA Fundamentals) and neither of them are looking for additional people at this time.
The core team will not be adding people except to fill specific support roles in the near term. While many recent volunteers would have without a doubt been happily welcomed to the BoK Committee a year or two ago, we just can’t justify the time investment required today to bring newcomers up to speed and to develop a shared view of the material.
There are a few openings on the Expert Board, but that group is limited to people who have a) published books, articles, or academic papers on the topics covered in our knowledge areas or b) who can effectively represent a particular interest group outside the BA community that nevertheless is impacted by the content of the BoK (ideally, we’d like published authors on the topic or people who’ve participated at a senior level in relevant professional associations or standards bodies–remaining possible slots for this second category include a product manager, QA expert, business rules expert, usability professional, and one or two others).
So what can you do?
The big volunteer opportunity next year will be to participate in the second practitioner review of the BoK. The first cycle was valuable and we learned a lot from it. One of the things we learned was that the BoK is too big for most people to be able to commit the time to slug through every page looking for problems in detail. Next time, we’re likely going to ask people to focus on one or two of the knowledge areas. We’ll be needing people to participate in that review and to help us organize and run it.
The second opportunity is for a person to assist the BoK team as a project co-ordinator. We’re looking for a person to help us keep minutes, track tasks and work to completion, and to follow up with people to make sure the BoK gets completed on time. It would be a great opportunity for someone looking to learn about the BoK itself and get some practical PM experience.
Other opportunities will arise during 2007 and 2008, certainly. It’s actually been a shame to have to tell some of the people who’ve approached me that I don’t have any work they can do–some of them are better qualified to work on the BoK than I was when I joined.
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