Best Practices For Process Documentation?

jollyreaper writes "I have a nice new IT job with a non-profit. They are a growing organization and management has realized that they need to bring their way of doing business up to a professional level. Several years back, their IT department was still operated like it was in a home office — fine when you're dealing with three people, not so good when there's over a hundred users. IT got its act together and is now running professionally and efficiently. The rest of the organization is a bit more chaotic and management wants to change that. One of the worst problems is a lack of process documentation. All knowledge is passed down via an oral tradition. Someone gets hit by a bus and that knowledge is lost forevermore. Now I know what I've seen in the past. There's the big-binder-of-crap-no-one-reads method, usually used in conjunction with nobody-updates-this-crap-so-it's-useless-anyway approach. I've been hearing good things about company wikis, and mixed reviews about Sharepoint and its intranet capabilities. And yes, I know that this is all a waste of time if there's no follow-through from management. But assuming that the required support is there, how do you guys do process documentation?"

Comments

Tough project

[ccguy]

In order to (successfully) document all the processes in your company you are going to need support not only from management but from all the staff as well. This is going to be the most difficult thing to get.

Forget about wikis and all technical solutions you can think of, for now. First, you need to explain everyone what they get by documenting everything. For most people, explaining what they do, how, etc, means to give away their value. I'm not saying it's true, it's just the way many people think, and this is why they refuse to cooperate as much as possible. Asking someone to document everything sounds like '...so we can replace you'. In particular, drop the 'hit by a bus' argument.

So, your project is probably not to be about documenting everything, but probably about improving those processes as well, making life easier for everyone (and making it clear than that's the final goal), etc.

Once processes are more or less defined (or redefined) with the participation of staff (meaning that they get to give feedback) you can implement a policy of 'all processes need to follow the documented procedure. Procedure can be changed if needed'. This will in turn help to keep your documentation updated.

Anyway you are definitely going to need help from a change management specialist, human resources, etc.

Re:Tough project

[ultranova]

For most people, explaining what they do, how, etc, means to give away their value. I'm not saying it's true, it's just the way many people think, and this is why they refuse to cooperate as much as possible.

Of course it is true. The whole reason to document, as given by the submitter, is to make people more easily replacable. Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace.

It simply isn't in anyone's best interests to cooperate with this kind of project; that's why it's doomed from the start.

So, your project is probably not to be about documenting everything, but probably about improving those processes as well, making life easier for everyone (and making it clear than that's the final goal), etc.

Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = layoffs. Again, no incentive to cooperate, and every incentive to sabotage.

Re:Tough project

[ccguy]

Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = layoffs. Again, no incentive to cooperate, and every incentive to sabotage.

See? That's exactly why an expert is needed to sell this to the staff. You need them to see the equation Improving the process = making it more efficient = people is more productive = we can produce more = we can make more money = we can give better bonuses.

You aren't going to get people on board by having a techie snooping around.

Re:Tough project

[dltaylor]

Dead wrong.

1) almost no one knows what knowledge others in their organization lack

2) very few people really know how much they know

3) almost no one ever has the time to catalog their knowledge and write it all down (if they do, they probably aren't doing anything and don't know anything)

Pick something, for example, a set of personal wikis. Start a "test run". Every time someone is asked how to do something by someone else, they don't explain verbally, they put it in their wiki. Between the requester's follow-up questions (also through the wiki) and the answers, there will be the "oral history" captured electronically.

Management has to provide the resources, and the startup training time, as well as some sort of recognition for those who answered "in form" and for the requesters that followed through "in form".

One other thought is that "how I do X" could be captured through voice recognition. As a staff member performs a task, they could verbalize the steps to some easy-to-use voice recorder, then those recordings parsed to on-line documents. Allow the staff member first crack at editing as a courtesy (you don't know what was captured), and while they're doing it, they may also think of more input.

Don't be a grammar Nazi on the wikis (or whatever tool). Save that for the professional training manual writer(s) that end up compiling the "official" procedure manual from the raw data.

Re:Tough project

[psmears]

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today ;-) The flip-side to these views is as follows:

Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace. Somone who is impossible to replace is impossible to promote

Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = layoffs. Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = increased capacity = PROFIT!!!

Re:Tough project

[CmdrGravy]

That is a flip side but in reality the other poster is right, as soon as you see any sort of company policy to capture knowledge and processes like this it's an immediate pre-cursor to them moving their operations somewhere cheaper and making you redundant.

I've seen this happen 4 times now and no one's gonna catch me out again ! You can still be promoted if no one knows how you do what you do because you'll still be around to handover and train your successor whereas the business is not going to have aas much success asking you to train your cheaper replacement.

Re:Tough project

[AndGodSed]

Well, the old adage goes "If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted."

If you can get the employees to take ownership of their jobs and see this as an opportunity to:

a) Learn a new skill (especially for the non-tech savvy types)
b) Reduce their work load
c) Create an opportunity to expand their portfolio to the point they are promoted to run a department and/or administer a person that has been employed to do their old job,

they should buy into this and support the idea.

Unfortunately as with most great ideas the actual sale is more problematic than the implementation.

In fact I'd say the sale is key.

Re:Tough project

[houghi]

The "Hit by a bus" thing I often see when people are either sick or on a holiday and nobody is able to tell what is going on, which leads to frustrations by people depending on certain input.

This can go from billing to system maintence to whatever.

The best solution, I have found, is to have at least three people able to do a certain task. ! person doing the task, one as a backup, who will still do the task once in a while as to be able to be up to date and a third as backup for the backup.

The main person is give the responsability of 'his' project. Ownership will cause involvement. This will almost always also cause a more streamlined process. As it is 'his project', he will work harder for it, compared to 'the bosses project'.

The main thing is to do it TOGETHER with the people, not in spite of them.

Re:Tough project

[base3]

An outside expert, i.e. a consultant. That will surely freak out the staff. The good news is that there are a couple of guys named Bob available for a reasonable rate.

Re:Tough project

[bscott]

> It simply isn't in anyone's best interests to cooperate with this kind of project; that's why it's doomed from the start.

It's not necessarily as simple as that - could be it's just not COOL to document, duuude!

The group where I work (a small IT services company) is mostly younger guys who like a 'hectic' atmosphere, lots of fast action and explosions, or at least busy troubleshooting schedules. Getting them to sit down and record their time spent on various projects is enough of a hurdle; getting anyone to document "office processes" is more like asking for volunteers to make a handwritten backup of each bit on a hard drive.

No one's job is threatened - it's a growing company - and everyone's smart enough to realize that things really would work better if we all were on the same page more often. It's just not fun. Even when I point out it's easier than their actual work, while being just as appreciated by the boss - it's not gonna happen.

Never mind the fact that sometimes "documenting processes" is more a matter of creating them from scratch than describing what's currently done... in a nutshell, if it was easy it wouldn't be an issue worth discussing.

(I never thought of using a "wiki" before, so I'm already a step ahead just from reading the synopsis of this story!)

Re:Tough project

[cammoblammo]

I agree.

I worked for a while in a small factory that manufactured a few different items. Every step of every job was thoroughly documented, and every workstation (i.e. point in the production line) had a poster on the wall explaining in ludicrous detail exactly how to do the job.

The stupid thing was that they were hard to follow. They had been written in consultation with employees, and at the time everyone agreed they were accurate. The problem was that most of the jobs could be picked up much, much quicker if you had someone showing you. Once you picked up a task you didn't need to look at the instructions.

On the other hand, our employer saw value in making sure all the employees could do most of the jobs in the factory. When I left there were no jobs I couldn't do that didn't require a trade qualification. I wasn't the only one.

Here's how it played: for ISO accreditation we were required to document everything we did. Apparently it guaranteed quality. The owner of the business found more value in making sure employees knew what they were doing, and getting them to do it. We could tell if somebody was deviating from the process because our products wouldn't pass the test suite.

The employer wasn't too worried about buses either. I remember one month about half the staff were away sick, on leave or pregnant. The employer put on a few temporary staff, but on the whole we were more than able to cope with just a few hours overtime a week. There was no appreciable decline in our productivity during that month, and I remember him joking that he could fire half of us and still make his money.

I'm glad he was joking. Apart from the money it was the best job I ever had.

Re:Tough project

[ultranova]

Someone got out of the wrong side of bed today ;-)

No, I'm merely trying to do as the marketing class always told us, and view this from the buyers point of view. It's not looking so good :(.

Something that is easy to replace is less valuable than something that is hard to replace.

Somone who is impossible to replace is impossible to promote

Perhaps. But this is only an impediment for the ambitious and confident, and even they can achieve promotions by changing jobs. Besides, we are heading towards a recession, so job security will propably count a lot more than advancement. Let's not forget that security is amongst the most basic needs.

On top of that, since this kind of move could be a precursor for layoffs or outsourcing, it is likely to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - and as we all know, people confronted by those tend to react by getting defensive and covering their back ("no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft").

Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = layoffs.

Improving the process = making it more efficient = making it require less manpower = increased capacity = PROFIT!!!

Good for the owners, but frankly, why should the employee care ? He's not going to benefit from it. And don't forget that laying off people to temporarily hike up the stock price is a standard trick nowadays; of course it is a stupid move in the long run, but by then the CEO has already gotten his bonuses.

In a way I can't help but think that business gets what it deserves. After all the outsourcing, layoffs to pump up the stock price, and abuses of at-will employment by control freaks, there is no trust left between the employees and employers. That means that whatever one does, the other will interpret in the worst possible way. This, in turn, makes it impossible to change anything, because any change is taken as some kind of devious plot, and sabotaged as such. In the long term, it would be much more profitable for everyone to build up sufficient trust that everyone works together rather than against one another; but that would benefit the future CEO and employees, rather than the ones making the decisions right now, who can benefit more if they screw the future for the sake of short-term profits, so it isn't bloody likely to happen. Which, in turn, really underlines why morality beyond mere rational self-interest is neccessary to have a prosperous society...

Re:Tough project

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That is a flip side but in reality the other poster is right, as soon as you see any sort of company policy to capture knowledge and processes like this it's an immediate pre-cursor to them moving their operations somewhere cheaper and making you redundant.

I've seen this happen 4 times now and no one's gonna catch me out again !

Ah, yes, proof by anecdote. Of all the forms of proof, this is second only to proof by intimidation (a.k.a. proof by stating personal opinion as fact) in its effectiveness. ;-)

Seriously and honestly, I think you've just had a bad run. I've been involved with a major corporation-wide process change/documentation exercise for nearly two years now. Pretty much everyone wants the changes in question and the training to match, because we're not trying to force things on people, we're trying to come up with a sane implementation of ideas that most of the grunts (which includes me in my main job) already support. Making the changes will improve the quality of what we do and make people's lives easier, and having proper training instead of the typical corporate "on the job training" approach (a.k.a. whispers on the grapevine) will give people the confidence to use the new ideas and not screw-up, which again makes everyone's life easier. There is just no way you could interpret the kind of thing we're doing as a precursor to outsourcing. Software is a knowledge industry, and management who still believes in outsourcing and getting rid of all your people with knowledge and experience is pretty much doomed whatever they do about processes.

Re:Tough project

[grimmfarmer]

However realistic your observations might be in light of modern corporate "greed culture" (which is different how, from 19th-century "greed culture"?), your pessimistic attitude and lack of treatment of a core criterion betrays the fact that you've never worked for a non-profit.

I own an IT consultancy that has worked for somewhere between 40 and 60 NPOs in the last several years, among other clients. Call it our "social mission". In contrast to the fundamental jadedness of your diatribe*, people working (not volunteering: working) for NPOs are typically 1) invested in the mission, 2) invested in the mission, and 3) invested in the mission. There's not too much ego going on, there...at least not below the Executive Director level. These people are, by and large, dedicated to the organization and, I suspect, would be more than willing to participate in a documentation initiative. Of the few NPOs we've kept on as clients -- WE have to make a profit, even if they don't -- most don't seem to experience resistance to process documentation. And it's especially crucial in the case of an NPO, where they can't necessarily afford to send more than one person to project management training, or pay for more than one "basic bookkeeping" course at the local community college. We've traditionally worked mostly with domestic violence/sexual abuse organizations, and the brave souls who work at them burn out like crazy. You wouldn't believe the turnover. Whatever knowledge or competencies the organization acquires over time must survive the coming and going of staff, and luckily, the staff generally knows this.

I guess it comes down to this, really:

1) process documentation is a necessity of business continuity (I'd be remiss as a consultant if it weren't included in my operational continuity plans for clients);

2) don't put the original poster off what it a worthy and crucial cause (especially since s/he works in IT at an NPO -- there will be enough challenges coming up, thank you very much);

3) start your own damned business, if you don't like how you've been treated by your employers.

* Dude: I've been laid-off, too, by the Big National ISP That Ate the Little Hometown ISP Where I Worked(tm), so I know what it's like to write "thanatopsis documentation".

Re:Tough project

[ozmanjusri]

The good news is that there are a couple of guys named Bob available for a reasonable rate.

I'm a guy named Bob.

Oddly enough, I'm also a consultant who frequently does process mapping, though my rates aren't all that reasonable any more.

There's no great trick to process mapping, and rarely any resistance or fear from employees if it's done properly. The key is to approach it hierarchically, make sure you get plenty of overlap in your descriptions of activities or procedures, and keep the document live so changes can be documented and errors corrected.

I generally try to start with functional groups which contain locations, locations which contain equipment, then equipment which requires activities. The main point, which may not be obvious first, is that context is king. There tends to be a lot of self-similarity about business activities, and without the context, important details will almost certainly get lost.

Re:Tough project

[CheeseTroll]

Can't be promoted, and can't really go on vacation, either.

Re:Tough project

[BVis]

Well, the old adage goes "If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted."

And the new adage that replaces that is "If you want a promotion or a raise of any consequence, start working for someone else."

People don't get promoted anymore. They piddle along in a job that they're either too valuable in to be moved, or they're too incompetent/lazy to be given more responsibility. There's no incentive to work hard in this environment; you can't get a promotion no matter what you do.

Re:Tough project

[CrazedWalrus]

Absolutely agreed.

I started a job as a IT supervisor about 6 months ago. There was very little useful documentation, and very little in the way of process. Everything was locked up in peoples' heads. The results?

• Extreme pain when someone goes on vacation
• Every time a particular issue comes up, that person has to drop what they're doing and go work on it, even if it isn't really their job description anymore.
• Very little confidence that we're doing the right thing when that person is away.
• Ludicrous amounts of time spent investigating something that a person could have told us easily.

We had two very experienced people leave in the space of two weeks, and another follow shortly thereafter. Most of the people on my team are pretty new, and we had a hell of a time trying to make up for the knowledge that walked out the door.

So what did I do?

Set up MediaWiki, of course. Initially, upper management was skeptical and slightly against, but I did it in my spare time and populated a couple hundred documents into it myself. It took days of boring, tedious work, copying from disparate sources, grabbing emails with useful information and making them into a coherent document...

The end result was something that, when I showed to the same upper management, they jumped. They made it standard operating procedure to document our processes, and even expanded the site to serve other departments. Amazing, considering it's only been around 3 to 4 months at this point.

Look, I know people say that docs "decrease their value", but that statement isn't worth its weight in horse shit. The fact is that, if you are an intelligent, useful person, your value is in *improving* the process or product. If you're stuck doing the same thing over and over like a farking monkey, then you're not really worth much more than a farking monkey. Eventually your "vendor lockin" will become obsolete, and then you won't be worth a thing. A genuinely helpful, useful person can simply go on to the new thing and help make that better too.

Re:Tough project

[torkus]

Exactly. In the past I've made an effort to build a proces, document things, and get tedious/repetitive tasks off my plate. Did that make me redundant and cost me my job? No. It got bonus/promotion in the best case and at least an attaboy.

If your job consists of doing something simple and/or repetative and you're the only one tho can do it because you're the only one who knows how...you job is already in jeopardy. Someone like me will eventually come in, simplify it and hand off to a lower paid person than you.

It's the creative work...creating things/processes/documentation/ideas that get paid well. Manually pulling complex SQL queries that are pretty much the same every time will only last so long before a mid-level developer with something to proves writes a simple front-end and makes you pretty useless.

Re:Tough project

[the eric conspiracy]

To maintain their pay, employees should be expected to demonstrate improved performance, or employers will (and should) seek out employees that will.

Employers like to promote the idea that there is no job security; the ying to that yang is that there is no employee loyalty.

If I improve my productivity over time, and you continue to offer me the same compensation for that increased performance, I will take my improved skills to another employer to obtain commensurate compensation. I will certainly not allow an employer to exploit me in the manner you describe.

Operational manual

[LiquidCoooled]

(1) Avoid being hit by a bus.

(2) Refer to 1.

Re:Operational manual

[phagstrom]

(3) If all else fails, make sure you get hit by a PCI bus.

ISO for non-profits?

[Naturalis Philosopho]

Check with ISO to see if they have a program for non-profits. This is the type of project that you can't just pull out of a hat. You need an organization that's done this before for other sites.

My experiences

[Anonymous Coward]

It's really hard to get people to write this kind of stuff. A wiki will work well for some people - developers and IT types particularly - but I've had mixed joy with non-technical types. I don't think it's the technology that's the problem, it's lack of desire to undertake the task and, in some cases, a wish to feel 'indispensable', which this process is trying to reduce. Some people find that very unnerving.

Where there is no motivation for the group to start documenting, I personally try and lead by example. If I have a process or a system that would benefit, I write a small and clear document (I try and keep it to one side of A4, three at most) and store it on the network. Generally, it never gets looked at, but when somebody needs to know how to do something, it is there and they appreciate it. I also document other people's processes as and when I need to know what they do.

After a while, and with some encouragement, people start to add their own documents and the whole thing starts to grow.

It's difficult though. The worst thing is when you see a company that have invested a lot of time and money writing process documentation that is clearly useless. The danger here is having the false sense of security.

It's also important to remember that the single biggest potential drain on a company is staff turnover, and this will always be the case, even if you have the best process documentation in the world. People are not cogs.

That's my (limited) experience. Might also be worth noting that I'm not a manager, I'm a developer, so I am working with and influencing my peers rather than my minions.

P.S. I hate Sharepoint and would not recommend it at all

I say go the traditional route.

[spazmonkey]

You could come up with new ways, of course, but why rock the boat. Just go with the tried and true way of handling these things in American corporate culture; Mandate all employees must stay away from buses.

  To accomplish this is quite simple:

  1. Create new management positions and dept. to determine and create new compliance metrics for appropriate bus avoidance.
  2. Create committee to determine and define best practices for avoiding buses.
  3. Hire PR firm to create awareness of above policies and create slick training videos to introduce employees to anti-bus methodology.
  4. Create HR sub-department in charge of enforcement and compliance to metrics with appropriate disciplinary board and/or retraining.

  See. Simple. Problem solved.

My approach

[Doug Neal]

My approach to documentation tends to be:

1. Put on to-do list
2. Procrastinate
3. There is no 3

Don't know if this qualifies as "best practice", though...

Re:My approach

[youthoftoday]

There is no 3 because it's a non-profit...

wikis

[nsupathy]

You have mentioned wiki in your posting. Wiki definetly works, especially inside a controlled environment like a team/company. There has to be a strong management support and each individual within the company has to realize that it's there for their own good. But many tend to hide the knowledge to keep their jobs safe. The only way is to tie the wiki update to their performance review cycle. Based on my experience, mediawiki is good for static documentation. twiki is a nice collaboration environment, but you will need IT guys with perl knowledge to effectively maintain and explore new features.

Re:wikis

[dazlari]

I work in the IT department of a largish retail company and we have over the last 6 months undertaken a wiki implementation; at first as an internal trial and then to roll out to the great unwashed. We're using Dokuwiki (php based) which is quite easy to install an manage and has a great active on-line community which certainly helps at the outset. Take time to understand the wiki software world fairly well; use the The WikiMatrix to help you discover and choose.
Some tips:

• Start with only one area of the business and get it done well. News will spread and everyone will want to be on board.
• Only deal with one individual from each part of the business. This centralises control and keeps some focus. If it's small and that means you then all the better.
• Certainly do not keep information on the wiki that is likely to go out of date any time soon. Wiki's are best at creating lots of relatively static documents that can be easily corrected and added to. You don't want to be changing minute critical details on the same pages constantly, such as keeping contacts, products, or business transactions. That is crazy! That's what business databases are for and they're far superior for many obvious reasons.
• Look to similar on-line wikis for structural concepts. Wikipedia, Wikibooks are good starting points. Link to the "empty" documents you want to create later as part of the early structural creation process.
• Avoid utilising extraordinarily special wiki features too often as they often become cumbersome to maintain and will scare away many novice users at which the page may be aimed.
• Be sure and test the wiki features out with several browsers!
• Add the documents that are immediately usable first; don't just add them for the sake of completion. This will save you time and increase the return on time invested.

Hmmm

[Hognoxious]

I think you work at the same place as me, except we're not a non-profit. Well, not intentionally.

More documentation may not be the answer.

[elronxenu]

From "Maverick! The success story behind the world's most unusual workplace" by Ricardo Semler ...

One of my first acts at Semco was to throw out the rules. All companies have procedural bibles. Some look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Who needs all those rules? They discourage flexibility and comfort the complacent. At Semco, we stay away from formulas and try to keep our minds open. I knew our rule book was useless when, as a test, I once distributed some additional pages for it. I asked some managers to read the new sections and give me their reaction. Almost everyone said they were just fine. Trouble was, I had stapled the pages together so they couldn't be read without first prying them apart. Funny how no one mentioned that. All that new employees at Semco get today is a 20-page booklet we call The Survival Manual. As you will see in Appendix D, it has lots of cartoons but few words. The basic message: Use your common sense.

Documetn the useful processes

[clickety6]

I've seen it where every process was documented - including those that were just common sense.

Did they really need a process to document how to arrange a meeting that had steps like "book a meeting room" and "invite participants to the meeting" plus a diagram showing the meeting with participants as an input.

I just imagine a guy sitting by himself in a meeting room wondering why he was all alone, checking the process manual and saying "Rats! I forgot step 37a - invite participants! At least I remembered step 62c so now all these cookies and all this coffee are just for me!"

Re:Documetn the useful processes

[kenp2002]

you are grossly underestimating the level of stupidity coming out of American schools these days. Yes, you probably need to document steps like "Invite Participants" and "Attend your own meeting." Jebus Rice Federal and State guidelines require a maximum of 8th grade reading level in writing. A max of 8th grade... WTF!?

I am at the point I have to document for some of these kids processes like, "In the event that you cannot log in, contact the help desk immediately at xxxxxxxx. You computer not working isn't an excuse to surf the web on the other functioning computer 4 feet away all day. And no problems don't just fix themselves overnight much like your laundry magically gets done by mom..."

Kids seriously don't undesrtand that they could actually WORK on the other computer. The concept is nearly alien to them. If THEIR computer doesn't work they have no comprehension that they could possible use a different computer.

Sadly either in a doc, wiki, or presentation you'd be suprised what you have to document now. Tons of kids that can tell you the year the Civil War started, but have no clue why it happened. Plenty of kids that can deploy Exchange but have no idea how to configure it to meet the business needs. They know how to do various steps in configuration but have no concept on how to stich all that together to provide a solution. Their like robots now, complete deterministic people in a digital universe. No analog throught anymore...

Wiki Culture

[Kristopher Johnson]

A company wiki can be very effective if people use it. Otherwise, it's just an electronic big-binder-of-crap-no-one-reads and nobody-updates-this-crap-so-it's-useless-anyway.

What's really needed is to develop a culture of documentation within the company. Ideally, whenever anyone asks a question that's been asked before, the response would be "It's in the wiki somewhere. Try searching for ...." When new hires start, tell them which wiki pages to read, and tell them they are authorized to fix any inaccuracies they find. Try having online discussions in the wiki rather than in e-mail. Summarize important offline discussions in the wiki.

When it works, it's really cool.

Too much good advice.

[evanyares]

Want to know how to sort it all out? Get some sticky notes, and a whiteboard. Write down each suggestion on a sticky note, and stick in on the whiteboard. Step back... look at it. Move some notes around. Group them. Get a dry-erase marker, and draw some boxes, circles, and arrows. Throw away the redundant notes. Repeat. Call in a co-worker. Repeat. Call in your boss. Repeat... as necessary. Now, take a picture of the whiteboard. Get a notepad, and summarize what you've found. Oh... and all those software tools and processes you were thinking about for knowledge capture? None of them work as well as a whiteboard and a pad of sticky notes. That's because none of them let you work unconstrained by artificial structure, and none of them let you step back and take in the whole of your work. By the way -- the second best tool for knowledge capture is a cocktail napkin.

FIRST: Capturing the Oral Tradition

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

OHHHH!!! ME!!! I KNOW THIS ONE!!!! Been there, done that, have the shurnken heads and tribal tattos to prove it! Also passed ISO9000 on the first try, with only minor criticism of the process docs I wrote.

These things become like folk medicine or a mystery cult, with multiple strands of "tradition" passed from Master to Student, with people adding their own ideas into them. You will need to reconcile the varying practices among the practicioners, which can lead to bruised egos and outright rebellion. After you have the real process identified and accepted, then you can decide how to deal with it.

1. Hire a temporary Technical Writer who had done this sort of thing before if you can. They can act like the outside anthropologist.
2. Let everyone know that they are going to clean up the documentation mess so that they can handle new hires, vacation replacements and temps without having to handhold them and spend days getting them up to speed (the real value of well-written process docs is as a training aid).
3. Department by department, identify the shamans: the person everyone goes to for training and problem solving.
   You can expect resistance from some shamans: their knowledge may be a source of power and job security to them. One carrot to dangle is the prospect of time freed to do different things instead of being stuck answering questions and training. A stick is the threat of being fired if it is discovered that thye are not handing over all they know - after all, they could be hit by a bus and you would be no worse off than if they are fired and take their tribal knowledge with them.
4. Have each of the shamans (or the tech writer, or a secretary) write down the process as they understand it - as they are doing whatever that department does, take notes. In a multi-shaman department, you will have several process documents.
5. If staff are following unofficial crib sheets and hand-written notes to themselves, collect these and make copies of them.
6. Someone - preferable the technical writer - takes the transcriptions and other documents and reconciles them. Wherever they are in agreement is a non-issue, provided that it works and doesn't violate regulations.
7. Anywhere two traditions differ must be reconciled. This may mean consulting the operating manual for a piece of equipment (maybe one tradition is using it wrong) and meeting with the shamans to decide which variant makes more sense, is faster, easier or what.
8. Write the final document and test it. Have someone follow the new process EXACTLY AS WRITTEN and see what happens. The definition of success is that they can follow the document and complete the process with a satisfactory product ... a completed form, a properly filed case, etc.
9. PUBLISH ... wherever it makes sense.

TIPS:

• Follow the process from incoming "raw materials" through to the exit of "finished product"
• While you are cleaning up the process, check the forms and related documents ... they might be simplified, or they might be the cause of part of your problems.
• The usual heirarchy is: Policies, Processes, Procedures. Write the docs as modules so you can change a procedure (say if you go from paper to computer filing) without rewriting the a 300-page mother-of-all documents. Policies point to processes, processes point to procedures.
  Refer to operating instructions, do not incorporate operating instructions (I saw one process where EVERYTHING was in the process instrucitons, including how to change the toner on a cdretain brand of photocopier!)

Wiki. CMS. Wiki. CMS.

[MrNemesis]

The world and his wife has already said it, but wiki's are an absolute godsend. My previous company took me and my partner on due to having a terrible IT outsourcer who charged them a fortune and provided shit service (whooda thunk it, eh?) and one of the first things we added was a wiki. When you're rebuilding an architecture from the ground up, you don't have the time or inclination to write huge tomes of docs, but you do have time to scribble notes in a wiki whilst package XYZ is installing or you're waiting for seven gigs of data to copy over a shoffy broadband link.

We eventually settled on Zope/Plone, and it made future IT maintenance an absolute breeze. Universal search of the object database meant finding a particular scribble was a piece of piss. Fine grained permissions mean we can safely add all of our backend IT stuff (architecture docs, ISP details, support contacts, machine names, the works) so that no-one else can see it. Web based means it's available throughout the company and usable over minimum bandwidth, inclduing GPRS on my blackberry. The ability to add a "comments" box to the end of every type of page object was an utterly superb idea, as was the inbuilt version control for file attachments.

Compare and contrast to my current company (who bought out the one with Plone); documentation is an absolute fucking nightmare. We're forced to type it in a very particular format in Word in such an arcane template that one wrong move re-numbering the mis-numbered bullet points can make whole sections just vanish (I've exponded more expletives over word than any other program in history - fine for quick letters, anything more complicated and it always seems to crumble to pieces); screenshots in word look absofuckinglutely terrible, and some docs are little more than a catalogue of screenshots from installing and configuring each stage of the app (useless IMHO because they're practically impossible to edit - no-one goes through it when reconfiguring, removing the obsolete screenshots and putting in new ones), unless you happen to live in one of our sub-domains, whose normal.dot is such that screenshots that take up the whole width of one of my domains' pages do no appear to exist on their computer (that's right, a completely 60 page blank document weighing in at over 15MB, as far as they can tell).

On top of the dogged insistence that Word be the holy grail of all document formats, each project team has their own documentation area and since there's alot of "architects hand this to ops who hand this to apps testing who hand this to helpdesk who hand this back to ops who then forward changes back to architects who then hand it down to..." going on, there's a veritable starburst of word documents all over the SAN, all pertaining to different sections of the app with about 80% overlap, much of it mutually contradictory, and since all depts use different (and manual, hence arbitrary) version numbering schemes you essentially just have to talk to practically everyone who's worked on that project to figure out WTF is going on. Since the documentation is in such a state, no-one bothers updating it, to the extent that when it's time to reinstall $app on a different server, you find the name of the database has changed and have the task of tracking down the one DBA who knows which box to look at. The few projects that do have "universal" documentation (typically because they're either small or under the helm of someone who laid down strict rules of where the docs should go to begin with) do so at the expense of permissions - they're typically available to normal users if you know the right path to put in to your run: dialogue.

Have pleaded and pleaded for a saner document management system, Plone was thrown out for the time being for being UNIX (!), at the moment they're trying to integrate the current docs in sharepoint. The words "fuster" and "cluck" spring to mind, although not necessarily spoonerised.

With a wiki and a remarkably small amount of self-discipline you can avoid the doc

Using stickies

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Using sticky notes to flow processes was a big deal to on one particular project I worked some years ago. The project team was given a conference room with a giant glass wall that divided it from the elevator lobby. Most people who used "the fishbowl" hated that wall; they'd close the drapes and get annoyed anytime anyone peeked in. And people did peek in; that's why it got the nickname.

I had a completely different attitude. I opened the drapes all the way and proceeded to cover that wall with sticky notes. As we held more and more meetings in there, team members got used to being watched and learned to ignore it. We developed our own code for note position and color that dictated what sort of action or task was defined on the note. Since the systems we were examining were huge and complex, we wound up with hundreds of sticky notes on the wall and, crazily enough, we could all grok it in toto.

Eventually, some of our bosses started hearing some water cooler talk about those people in the fishbowl. They started dropping by our floor and lingering in the elevator lobby. They saw our animated and intense discussions (they couldn't hear us) and took in the breathtaking complexity of our sticky note art, then left convinced that we were doing a lot of work. Now, mind you we *were* actually doing a lot of work but we could just as well have been planning where to go for lunch. The folks outside the glass had no real idea. But the impression became widespread that we were all a bunch of creative geniuses running our own skunk works.

After that project wrapped (and incidentally increased revenues by a few billion, yes, *billion* dollars), I think every one of us parlayed that air of mystery we had created into better positions.

Sticky notes. I love 'em.

Re:Sharepoint weakness

[Gopher971]

The main weakness with using Sharepoint as a knowledge repository is that the MOSS search functionality is extremely limited. The search used is the MS developed search, not the search that is used on their OS's or on MSN. When creating a knowledge repository or Knowledge base always ensure that you use a platform that allows you to integrate a search engine.

The message is brought to you by someone who has been struggling (badly) with a Sharepoint based knowledge base for the last 8 months.

Re:Critical Tasks

[Dystopian Rebel]

Ahh, finally a slashdot discussion that truly applies to my profession!

For me too! I drive the bus that hits people who have kept crucial organizational knowledge to themselves.

It's a living.