I recently revisited JoAnn T. Hackos’s Information Process Maturity Model (IPMM, full-text PDF). The IPMM defines five levels for organizations that produce documentation, ranging from “ad-hoc” to “optimizing.”

The IPMM originates (mostly) with Hackos’s 1994 book Managing Your Documentation Projects. By predating Google, the Agile Manifesto, and publishing on the web first (and in print practically never), it’s a fascinating artifact to see what has and has not stood the test of time.

Setting aside the waterfall worldview, I am struck by how much I dislike the IPMM’s view of the lower levels of immaturity, though I respect the hustle for resources. So much of my work is open source where “mature” process brought on too early can interrupt healthy exploratory work and community building. Many projects should have “immature” docs processes, especially when they’re still in a self-discovery phase.

In any case, the IPMM was both inspirational and anti-inspirational for my open source documentation maturity checklist. In that checklist, I was more concerned with the ways that open source documentation work meshes with the development of the software itself, rather than docs production in isolation.