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.

Comments

Re:Consulting

[nine-times]

I agree mostly. Sort of.

The problem with it, if I'm being honest, is that I want to do a good job. I don't want to screw things up for my employer, especially if I have a decent relationship with them. So if they say, for example, "Hey, go ahead and delete these files," and I know those files are very important, I'm not going to just delete them without saying anything, wait for them to discover the problem, and then say, "Well you told me to do it!" I'm going to give them a big warning that they've just asked me to do something stupid. I may even fight them on it a bit.

Now if they absolutely insist that I delete important information, I might go ahead and do it. I'd probably say, as the last thing I do before deleting it, "Just to be clear, I'm doing this at your request, overriding my own objections." I might even put that in writing.

To me, that kind of conscientiousness shouldn't end when you start planning to leave your company. So in that vein, I agree with you, with the assumption that you're also informing the employer what you're doing, and making it clear why you're doing it. Tell them, "I'm saving these documents here. These are important for my successor. I don't recommend deleting them, since then my successor may have trouble doing [whatever]. Would you prefer that I store them anywhere else?" If they ignore that and delete the files, then that's their own fault, and you charge consulting fees for helping them.

I also agree that they probably won't hire you on as a consultant. No matter how indispensable you are, the graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Let's turn the question around!

[tlambert]

Let's turn the question around!

Hi.

I'm an employer who intends to fire someone, but they don't know it yet, and I don't want to clue them into it by bringing in their successor ahead of time, for fear of what their reaction might be, or what they might delete.

I have access to all of their company email, since it's stored on a central server, and I want to know how to turn this stash of email into a set of useful instructions for their successor.

Can anyone help? It's really annoying when there is someone in a critical position that you hate enough that you want to get rid of them, and they hate you enough that you can't trust them to "play nice".

Does that about sum up the actual situation?

I say you (plural) have already failed

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of doing the job responsibly, especially for such highly special specialist jobs, is to keep documentation. So if all you have is a large bundle of messages* in some proprietary format that may or may not survive the upgrade to the next version of the required proprietary software, you have essentially already failed your duty of keeping reasonable documentation.

Maybe my sysadmin background is showing, but I do expect site documentation to exist, and if it doesn't, I will start it first thing, and I will try to keep it updated. I typically set up a wiki (one with CREOLE support, but that really is but a taste issue), but even plain text in RCS(!) will do nicely. If you have nothing else, then your favourite word processor might do, but then you need to export archivable versions like PDF/A, or even print the thing--and how do you expect your successor to keep the documentation updated then?

Any road, you're plenty late with this. The only way to avert total failure is to make up for it by producing coherent documentation in a hurry. Good luck with that.

Then again, the organisation obviously doesn't care, so perhaps it needs to fail too, just so it might learn. I would probably and completely unofficially... ah, but that'd be telling.

* You may think of it as email, but then you know about as much about email as the authors of said software do. Quelle surprise most "email" is unreadable crap.

Re:Okaaay.

[VoiceOfDoom]

Kinda harsh - I don't think of myself as any kind of snowflake and we're not talking about technical IT knowledge here but understanding of privacy law and how it applies to a pretty unique non-profit health and social care organisation.

No doubt any other data protection expert can come in and suss it all out - just thought it might benefit the organisation if the learning curve for the new bod were a little less steep.....

Re:Okaaay.

[GerryHattrick]

Exactly what I did, after a lifetime of ever-unfinished international legal diplomacy. Except - I gave a copy of the DVD to the boss's secretary, and a copy to another secretary. Bosses would never bother to look, but good secretaries would compete to find answers.