What are your standards?

How are your projects managed? What artifacts do you need for content strategy? Are your designers delivering code? How can they start doing that? What are those deliverables? Do your designs work for the user? For the business? Did you remember to set a performance budget? What is that budget based on? Does everyone agree on the definition of responsive web design. What coding standards are you using? Do they make sense for responsive design? With your preprocessors? For designing systems of reusable components and layouts?

In most organizations, a codified set of standards is hard to pin down. Often, many of the hard questions about how to proceed either have unspoken answers, are decided on a project-by-project basis, or simply don't exist. Even when you've come up with standards and best practices, often it's hard to collaborate with the wider industry to make them better.

At NBC, we were faced with answering the question "what are our standards?". What emerged was North, a standards document detailing our process and our definitions, written to be useful and usable by everyone. We open sourced it in order to be able to collaborate with the best and brightest in the industry in order to improve our process and help solve some of the hard questions we have run in to. We put it out there so it can be challenged and discussed, allowing us to improve our thinking and draw on other's experience to make our process run more smoothly. Being a living document, it can be updated as industry best practices do and evolve as our technologies do.

And we want you to collaborate with us.

Standards are hard, but if we can align and guide our projects, if we can point our projects North, we can improve not only how we work, but our industry as a whole.