Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How To Turn an Email Stash Into Knowledge For My Successor?
VoiceOfDoom writes: I'm leaving my current position in a few weeks and it looks unlikely that a replacement will be found in time. My job is very specialized and I'm the only person in the organization who is qualified or experienced in how to do it. I'd like to share as much of my accumulated knowledge with my successor as possible but at the moment, it mostly exists in my email archive which will be deleted after I've been gone for 90 days.
The organization doesn't have any knowledge management systems so the only way it seems I can pass on this information is by copying all the info into a series of documents, which isn't much fun to do in Outlook. Can my fellow Slashdotters can suggest a better approach? By the way, there's quite a lot of confidential stuff in there that my successor needs to know but which cannot leave the organization's existing systems.
The organization doesn't have any knowledge management systems so the only way it seems I can pass on this information is by copying all the info into a series of documents, which isn't much fun to do in Outlook. Can my fellow Slashdotters can suggest a better approach? By the way, there's quite a lot of confidential stuff in there that my successor needs to know but which cannot leave the organization's existing systems.
I'm leaving my current position in a few weeks and it looks unlikely that a replacement will be found in time. My job is very specialized and I'm the only person in the organization who is qualified or experienced in how to do it
Look, it's "I'm a Special Little Snowflake" syndrome.
Also, didn't we get a similar question to this last month (How to leave my technical knowledge, that is not documented on any company-wide system for some reason, to my replacement)?
Just select all the mail you've got and forward to someone who will be around - like your manager (he/she will appreciate the extra e-mail - it will make him/her feel more important) - and then have them forward all the mail to the new person.
//TODO: create a signature
On one hand, it seems like an honorable request to establish a knowledge base that shares institutional and situational history with your successor.
For the organization, however, it represents a responsibility that they should somehow be shouldering. If indeed they sanction this, may I suggest considering transferable knowledge base software like Evernote, or the like, to feed docs, URLs, workflow information, and so forth. Email histories have legal status, and so you must be careful as to what's transferred, subject to the jurisdictions and audit/regulatory authorities involved-- in other words, a legal problem.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You can print them. You can forward them. You can paste them into a document and pass them on.
Or you can realize that if the company doesn't care enough to have a replacement hired, or a system in place to store this knowledge ... they either don't know or don't care enough to plan for this.
Ask your manager, if his response is "gee, I don't know, I'll get back to you" ... well, then it's their damned problem.
Wanting to make transition is a nice thing, but at a certain point, your employer also has to take ownership of that process.
At a certain point, hand holding your employer through such things isn't really your problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
1) Do your best to store it where it won't get deleted
2) Sign an agreement with them on your billing rate if they call you for help
3) Don't look back unless they call
This should be SOP. BTW, they usually don't call.
>> I'd like to share as much of my accumulated knowledge with my successor as possible
Don't worry about it unless your manager told you to do so. (Your manager knows you're leaving right? And you've told your manager that there might be useful info your email, right?)
>> The organization doesn't have any knowledge management systems
Don't worry about this either. These are all overrated and highly ignored by most organizations that own them anyway.
also you can convert the .pst into html and put it on the company intranet if that's more palatable.
https://www.google.com/webhp?h...
Sounds like a total failure to document anything....
Everywhere I've worked in the past few jobs I've had, processes and procedures and anything important about business process has to be documented on a wiki (or more recently, everyone seems to have gone to confluence) and documenation is considered REALLY important.
Sounds like the places I've worked have learned the value of employee knowledge and suffered from employees leaving with vital knowledge not documented.
You either work for either a really tiny organisation, or a business that just hasn't suffered through an important person with a lot of important knowledge leaving.
Oh well. Their problem.
Move on and forget your current employer.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Don't bother with this unless your manager asks. It's their problem to ensure your replacement can do the job. No offense intended, but it sounds like you're making yourself sound more important than you really are. While I'm sure you are a hard worker and did your job very well, I've never ran into a situation where a company was SOL when any one particular person left. However, I've known lots of people who thought they were the only ones who knew how to do their job. In the end, it always turns out that the company does just fine and has no problem filling the role. If you really are that important to the company, then offer to help them out at a respectable contract rate; They won't call though.
Whatever format you dump it in, it's unlikely that your successor will bother reading through it. Either they will be skilled up in whatever it is you were doing and will spend the first few weeks slagging off your name for not leaving any coherent documentation (a not unreasonable option: look! all he left was a pile of emails! It'll take months to make head or tail of all that crap!), or the company will recruit someone who hasn't a clue and will re-invent the basic functions. Or (more likely) your company will dump the whole thing and realise that there are other ways of doing what you did. Ways that are both supportable and easy to recruit people to do.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It is no longer your problem.