Dear All
It appears my nice standards went hay wire!
I attach a verswion in free text below. A pdf version is avail on request
Version Control at Leicestershire County Council
Background
This piece of work has been developed because of a need to identify
versions of documents held by Leicestershire County Council in a consistent
way to support administrative use and the standards of BIP 0008 and ISO
15489 (and possibly some impact with ISO 9000). There is also a need to be
compliant with EGMS and this work may well inform the custodians of EGMS in
relation to a new element. For reasons of legislative compliance (FOI, DPA
etc) and other legal requirements we need to be able to evidence decisions
relating to versions of documents/records. Information sharing with other
organisations requires a consistent framework for version control. What is
a draft in one organisation may well be published in another if version
control is not consistent with commonly understood and adhered to standards.
Version Control Options
There is very little advice and guidance in the UK relating to Version
Control Standards. Indeed Google yielded only two pages with a specific
search for “Version Control Standards” It is well acknowledged that
control is required to provide evidence of what is the latest version and
what makes it different from its predecessor.
I have seen many variations of version control, for example:-
Draft version 1
Version 0.1
Draft
Draft 1.0
Draft 1
0.01
The latter is my description of the first version control for a piece of
work.
We need to evidence the validity of a document/record as it moves through
its lifecycle or its existence in a records continuum.
Whilst we can have a version control number with clear rules, as version
move through iterations, we need to understand what changes were made from
its earlier version. This provides some tangible relevance to the
document/record value.
Version Control at Leicestershire County Council
At Leicestershire County Council we are starting to develop better records
management practices as we move into EDRMS. In scope but not dependent
upon a move to EDRMS is version control. EDRMS provides a far more
comprehensive set of version control management tools. However, we are not
dominated by EDRMS and will not be for sometime to come. Even when we are,
we need to ensure our values remain consistent relating to version control.
We have experimented with many of the above and have now come upon a
standard which we believe works well and is sustainable over time.
Version Control Standards
The first prepared/saved content is valued as 0.01, if not complete. We
choose not to use 0.1 for the following reason. A first final version
would benefit from the following mark 1.0. A minor release update
following on from this would be 1.1, thus the first number after the
decimal is reserved for release minor updates. For example, the following
represents a typical document standard of version control:
Version Control Standards 0.01 (still draft)
Version Control Standards 0.02 (still draft)
Version Control Standards 0.03 (still draft)
Version Control Standards 1.0 (First final version – i.e. put to its
designed use)
Version Control Standards 1.01 (an update draft of version 1.0, not yet
released)
Version Control Standards 1.02 (still an update draft, not yet released)
Version Control Standards 1.1 (a minor update in final format released for
use)
Version Control Standards 1.11 (a draft update to version 1.1)
Version Control Standards 2.0 (a major update - final version released for
use)
Conclusion
This paper has been released for use/comment. Please provide any views to
[log in to unmask] .
This paper is copyright LCC © and may be used as recipients see fit without
licence.
|