Ceremony Design

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:

1. PR Gate (every PR) — Automated + manual checks before merge
2. Weekly Drift Audit (weekly) — Detect standards divergence between PRs
3. 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

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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