It is important to review any existing documents (maybe from previous projects) before re-inventing the wheel (standards and guidelines). My preference is to review existing standards with my customer and recommend any enhancements or additions that may be required for the conversion project. Consider locating the following:

1. Infrastructure guidelines - Usually found via the technical staff (systems personnel). Review for any gotchas, and include a report on usage of the intended platforms.

2. Database guidelines - Usually found via the database administrators or keepers of the production databases. This could be internal or external people.

3. Data modeling standards and guidelines - Usually found by talking with the enterprise data modeler or the manager of data management, and should include naming standards and entity/attribute definitions.

4. Change management standards and guidelines -  If this customer is in an "out-sourced" environment, find the person in charge of program/job execution.

5. Corporate best practices - Usually found in the data management group.

After reviewing all the above mentioned document, analyze for gaps. A gap could be any of the following:

1. They don't have any of these standards or guidelines, and need to include a few based on corporate requirements for this conversion project.

2. Just a few tweaks to existing documents may be all this project has to be in compliance.

3. Best practices may need to use industry examples.

Standards always seems like a waste of time, but are truly worth their weight in gold as the project progresses.