This was fun to write, though it's hard to boil everything down to 10 big steps. I thnk as an industry we tend to forget that there are a LOT of us wearing multiple hats, working solo, just trying to get things done - and while we want to do things the right way, there isn't always clear guidance to help is figure it all out. This is a very short attempt at starting to map that out.

Article is at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Career/61535/, and there are nice comments in the attached thread if you have time to read that as well. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Career/61535/