SNOMED CT Editorial Advisory Group (AG)

Montevideo Uruguay

Prioritization of tracker items

JCA said he aimed to get the AG more involved in prioritization of tracker items. Slide showing current status of tracker as of 26 Oct 2015:

• Open tracker items
  • Content tracker – 748 open items
    • 302 rated “High” or “Highest”
    • Pre-coordination tracker – 200 open items
      • Most rated “Low”
  • Review of size – content tracker only
    • 142 rated “large”
    • 196 rated “medium”
    • 356 rated “small,” “single concept” or “less than 10 concepts”
    • 54 not assigned size
    • Currently under review
  • Lifecycle phase
    • None – 5 items
    • Inception -578 items
    • Elaboration – 108 items
    • Construction 42 items
    • Transition – 15 items.

JCA said the area that concerned him most was the elaboration phase. A lot of work had been done, but there had been insufficient review to move them forward out of the elaboration phase and into the construction phase, where they could be added to the Content Roadmap. He said the Consultant Terminologists, had been asked to help move them forward had done so.

Slide on Content tracker discussion items:

• 82 items opened in the last year
• 3 items closed in the last year  (1:02:43)
• New items being added faster than they can be resolved
  • High volume of day-to-day work prevents addressing time-consuming editorial issues
  • Bottlenecks
    • Review of documentation from Consultant Terminologists a bottleneck
      • What role can the Editorial AG play to remove this bottleneck?
      • Key point is moving from Elaboration to Construction phase, Then it goes to the content AG for prioritization
    • Resources not available to do the construction.

KCA said there had been some discussion of the issue at the Consultant Terminologists meeting the prior day. There was a feeling that the inception, elaboration and construction documents were opaque to the tracker and to web searches, creating an impediment to grouping them together or making them coherent sets of work. KCA recommended the following steps in light of IHTSDO’s transition to JIRA and Confluence,:

1. Add a phase on Triage. Try to get lot of information embedded in those documents as fields in the JIRA tracker. What use cases does this support, for example. Those fields then would become sortable to try to prioritize.
2. Move away from these docs being on MS Word and put them on Confluence so that they become become searchable and linkable. That way these docs become less opaque. Might be able to link, organize and prioritize them better, increasing efficiency.

JCA asked KCA to share the recommendations so that they could be included in the minutes. KCA agreed.

GRE make the following points:

1. At least 20 percent of the cases could be closed because they were based on a misunderstanding. They should be dead on arrival.
2. Some of the cases in the trackers were about very specific issues and would never get onto the priority list. 
3. The waterfall model of inception, elaboration, etc. did not reflect how the terminologists actually work because sometimes a topic in the elaboration phase needs to go back into more testing and be revised.
4. The documents are burdensome to complete. In trying to detail everything, one ends up with something that is killing everyone. The end-to-end process ends up being quite intensive and needs to be less bureaucratic and more agile.
5. An exchange platform like Confluence would help.
6. The Consultant Terminologists could help with the content tracker bottlenecks by saying “This has already been discussed” or “This is part of another thread,” or by grouping topics.

PAM agreed but said that there was an educational need for projects for the Consultant Terminologists.

GRE said the Consultant Terminologist Program needed some revisions. There was no training in modeling and no evaluation of whether objectives were being met. Program participants worked on five specialized issues, but completion not mean that they could model in a consistent way.

PAM said he did not disagree, but some of the tracker items could be used in the program and those needed to be identified.

JCA pointed out that without trying to implement their solutions, the Consultant Terminologist candidates would have no idea whether they’ve modeled correctly. There could be a focus in the program on implementation of modeling and on testing procedures so they could verify that there models are accurate and so that staff editors would be confident that testing has been done and the solution would not break the terminology.

GRE said the new tooling platform would help with that testing.

JCA said he would like to see the Consultant Terminologists become editors, so everything proposed was in the direction he wanted to go. Further, he agreed that the current document structure was too heavy and duplicative and they needed to move to a template-based, incremental approach, revising the documents through various stages. Confluence instead of MS Word would add the power of linking documents.

GRE said it would be useful to do a high-level triage of what is there: which projects are giant, are small, are low priority, will not work, require additional resources, etc.

JCA asked if the Editorial AG could help with that? GRE said he thought the AG would do whatever JCA needed to move things forward. JCA said part of the role of the group could be to review trackers and come up with justification on whether to continue the projects or not.

Linda Parisien said the Content Managers AG was also talking about working with the trackers so there should be coordination. JCA said he would discuss it with Ian Green.