| name | ceremony-design |
| description | Design a quality ceremony that drives standards compliance |
Ceremony Design Skill
Create a new quality ceremony that sustainably enforces standards through team rituals.
Context
Ceremonies are scheduled, repeating quality checks that ensure standards are maintained and drift is caught. A well-designed ceremony becomes part of the team's workflow — efficient, purposeful, and actually attended.
Domain Context
The three main ceremonies in claude-standards are:
- PR Gate (every PR) — Automated + manual checks before merge
- Weekly Drift Audit (weekly) — Detect standards divergence between PRs
- Release Gate (before release) — Final comprehensive audit
Each ceremony has: a trigger, participants, a checklist, success criteria, and escalation paths.
Reference: levels/L2-ceremonies/ceremonies/
Instructions
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Define ceremony essentials — Answer these questions:
- Trigger: When does this ceremony run? (every event, scheduled, on-demand)
- Owner: Who runs it? (team lead, rotating person, automated)
- Participants: Who should be involved? (which roles/functions)
- Cadence: How often? (every PR, daily, weekly, monthly, pre-release)
- Duration: How long should it take? (5 min, 30 min, 2 hours)
- Deliverable: Ceremony definition document
-
Design the checklist — What gets verified?
- List specific checks (not vague goals)
- Right: "Run check-doc-index.sh and verify no orphaned docs"
- Wrong: "Make sure documentation is good"
- Each check should be executable (can someone follow it exactly?)
- Deliverable: Step-by-step checklist
-
Automate what you can — Reduce manual work
- Identify which checks can be run by scripts (most doc/reference checks)
- Identify which require human judgment (code quality review)
- Create or reference scripts for automated checks
- Deliverable: List of automated checks + scripts
-
Define success criteria — When is ceremony complete?
- "All automated checks pass AND no blocking issues found" — too vague
- "check-doc-index.sh passes AND check-standards-refs.sh passes AND reviewer approves" — clear
- Success criteria determine whether work can proceed
- Deliverable: Clear, testable success criteria
-
Design escalation path — What happens if ceremony finds issues?
- Who gets notified?
- What happens if issues are found?
- Is work blocked, or can it proceed with known issues?
- Who has authority to override?
- Deliverable: Escalation flowchart or rules
-
Measure ceremony health — Are issues actually getting fixed?
- Track: Issues found per ceremony, percentage fixed, time-to-fix
- If most issues are ignored, ceremony is ineffective
- If ceremony is never triggered, something's wrong with the trigger
- Quarterly: Review metrics and adjust cadence/checklist
- Deliverable: Metrics dashboard or review process
Anti-Patterns
-
Too many ceremonies — Team is overwhelmed with review processes
- Wrong: Daily drift audit + weekly drift audit + pre-PR review + post-merge review + monthly release check
- Right: PR gate (automated) + weekly drift audit + pre-release gate
- Impact: Ceremonies become annoying → people skip them → no enforcement
- Guard: Start with 2-3 ceremonies max; add more only if team asks
-
Ceremonies nobody attends — No one shows up for the scheduled review
- Wrong: "Weekly drift audit, Wednesday 2pm" — nobody comes
- Right: "Run drift-audit.sh Friday morning before standup, async review, sync discuss blockers"
- Impact: Drift isn't caught
- Guard: Ceremony timing should be convenient; async options are better than requiring attendance
-
Ceremonies without outcomes — Ceremony runs but nothing changes
- Wrong: Run audit, find 5 issues, don't create any issues or PRs
- Right: Run audit, prioritize issues, create 1-2 PRs to fix top priority items
- Impact: Standards knowledge builds but practice doesn't improve
- Guard: Every ceremony should result in at least 1 action item
Further Reading
levels/L2-ceremonies/ceremonies/ — Reference ceremony definitions
levels/L2-ceremonies/ceremonies/pr-gate.md — Example well-documented ceremony
levels/L1-context/library/quality/governance.md — Standards enforcement principles