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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)?
Dump your mailbox to an archive and pass the archive along with a note telling them to search it for keywords whenever a question comes up.
Just export a .pst file of all your emails and import into your successor's outlook. Keep the file for backup.
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.
Since there may be legal items with just archiving a PST file and leaving it for a successor, it may take some time, but creating an internal wiki on a secure computer may be the best thing, even if it just is copying documents from E-mail attachments and throwing them in the wiki's file structure.
I'd just move the messages needed to a folder export that as a PST file and put it on the share that your other relevant data lives. They can open or import that PST to get at the messages after the server side archive deletes things.
There was (is?) a programming language, called Visual Basic, which was optimized for programming (automating) parts of Microsoft Office. Visual Basic scripts can be helpful in moving text from Outlook, into Word, Excel, and Access. It might take more time to learn Visual Basic, but if you prefer to avoid menial labor, and don't mind learning a programming language, it might be up your alley.
Print out all of your emails on 4x6 cardstock and bundle them up by conversation thread.
Wrap them in newspaper and stash them in various forgotten corners of the office.
Attach to teach cryptic notes that give directions to where he(or she) can find the next bundle.
It will be like a scavenger hunt! What fun!
I don't know what the information is, or how it could be organized, but maybe you could add a series of PST data files in Outlook to categorize the emails, and then save each PST at appropriate, somewhat permanent network locations.
Work with your exchange admin to give your replacement permissions to your inbox. They can then open it as a second mailbox. Make sure that you delete any personal stuff first.
Another option is to have your Exchange admin create a public folder and only give permissions to you and your replacement. You can then move the email into the public folder and have shared access until you leave.
Those are the only two methods that I can think of where the information would not leave the Exchange system. Typically, this is done by exporting email from the old mailbox and importing it into the new using a PST file, but the email is temporarily outside of the system during this process.
Load your printer up, select all the emails, and print them off. You'll probably want to position an "in" basket to catch all the sheets in order. Or, maybe thirty "in" baskets, or more. Stack baskets neatly on corner of desk. Job complete.
For shits and giggles, you could load the printer with disappearing ink.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
..and then give it to your successor's boss to pass on.
Load everything into an affinity diagram. Scan all your e-mails for salient information, separate it by category, and put those bits under headings. Use that to expand into brief documentation. It'll be organized and easily approached: your first scan will give you an orderly set of data to work from, rather than a mound of abstract e-mails.
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I'm going to be blunt. Your respect for your employer outweighs your employer's respect for you by at least an order of magnitude. That is a huge mismatch, and you're on the bad side of it. I understand you consider your job important and yourself difficult to replace, but mark my words, your employer doesn't feel that way at all, even if they say so. Do yourself a favor and just give the standard 2-week notice, provide them with a basic info sheet, a firm hand shake and move on. After all, that is exactly what they are expecting you to do, since they view the relationship as one of pure business (with the bottom line being money, no more, no less). After you leave, the only reason your name will come up is to conveniently blame something on you, certainly not to reminisce about how great of an employee you were and how important your job was. So don't waste your time on something that not only won't benefit you, but that won't even be appreciated by your former employer. Concentrate your efforts on your new job from this point on.
This is something which I've been wondering about for a while --- given that people won't be disciplined enough to use a wiki or other content management system, why not just dump all corporate communications into a single archive?
Use some sort of expert system to make an initial effort at putting things into a hierarchy based on sender, recipient and subject line, strip out all attachments and replace them w/ a link to the stored copy of the file.
If need be, have some sort of system for determining access levels based on recipient.
Bonus is people would be forced to accept that work e-mail was to be used for work stuff only.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Set up a knowledge base. We use Wordpress, but you could use a Wiki or something. Both are free.
The correct answer is 42.
I just say that arrays of labels, may be the oddest thing in C; the ANSI GNU version had none of it, only proprietary and I am assuming platform dependent / patented C implementations had the feature. This improved algorithmic performance, switch / case statements are sequential searches in a way; dynamically linked functions, before load time linkage, ie .so's where function pointers and still are slow (mainly used to dynamically link to a COFF or ELF on UNIX at runtime). Eventually virtual linkage at runtime made its' way as virtual inheritance to C++ and algorithms could take paths without doing a sequential search through case options. Not sure why anyone would think the result of assignment operation going into if statement is odd.
Arrays of goto labels existed on Sun Microsystems "ANSI" C, those were the days.
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.
But is .pst the best format to do that?
Personally I'd prefer a Maildir or mbox or MIX as the export format.
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.
Do you really think the company would be as accommodating to you? If they don't have anybody skilled enough to take over from you it's their problem not yours. It's noble and all trying to help out the company or your successor but if it's not required of you don't do it. If you start copying data around, making copies, etc etc it might just flag up in IT and raise some eyebrows.
Just go to your manager, say that your successor might need access to your e-mail archive and suggest they ask the IT dept to save a copy for future access. Then blacklist their phone number the second you leave and never give it a second thought.
First, I know people are telling this guy to just walk away without documenting anything, but I think he's doing the right thing. Yes, there's no employee/employer loyalty anymore, but I've worked with a bunch of people that I would never consider working with again because of their actions or attitude. Even in a big industry, I'm amazed how many times I've run into people from former employers...and reputations do follow you. You don't want to be remembered as they guy whose mass of scripting blew up 3 days after he left and required weeks of consulting to pull apart. (Yes, this has happened to me.)
My recommendation for this task is OneNote. It's structured enough and free-form enough at the same time to handle an internal knowledge base. No one is going to keep a wiki going unless there's a real need, and commercial knowledge base software, usually tied to million-dollar ITIL compliant ticketing systems, is useless. Even better, you can directly paste in emails from Outlook. OneNote also lets you quickly mess around with screenshots, diagrams, and Office documents. I've used this method to communicate some of the proprietary stuff that off-the-street sysadmins wouldn't know about.
Something like this is useful in organizations like the one I'm in now -- where knowledge sharing is an extremely formal process requiring documents be written in a certain format, every aspect of a system needs to be documented in full detail, etc. This gives the person following you at least a head start before they start digging into the formal stuff. Kind of like the mystery letter every President leaves behind for his successor.
Move it all to your private email server, then only give them what you think they need. Seems to have worked well for her.
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?
There's really two problems with consulting for the old company. Firstly it's just going to be distracting to the process of acclimating to your new role, company and peers. Secondly it does not sound like, in general, the company is very efficient to begin with. It may take much longer than anyone expects to find and hire a replacement. As time progresses many of the minute details of that knowledge will fade.
Documentation and email never forgets the details you put in them. Create a backup and give it to your manager. If you do insist on any consulting make sure its limited in scope to explaining something in the documentation you left and that your agreement terminates in 30 days.
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.
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The question is a simple ETL task; take email as the input and output to a document. I have seen powershell able to access Outlook folders, and once you have it in powershell you can pretty much do what you want with it. You might be able to follow threads, only include missing blocks of text, ignore signatures, etc.
The real question is why make the effort of converting the emails to documents when, really, who is going to look through it? If someone is trying to find out where attribute FooBar is being set in program JarJar2001, how are they going to know which document to open? You need a good search engine, and the best ones are in knowledge management applications. Look at OpenText or Hyland or any other ECM app, or get Altiris to at least index what you have.
If the company isn't willing to take knowledge management seriously then neither should the OP.
-AlPhAbEt
http://zim-wiki.org/
Personal desktop wiki that stores everything in flat text files, which can be stored somewhere like dropbox. My full review here: http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com...
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I am the successor who inherited someone else position after the guy and doesn't really want to help me in figuring out how to do his job. Please, help me. I know the boss is a jerk, but I am straight out of school and I need to make this work or else.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If you can setup a contracting agreement with your soon-to-be-previous employer, then you can be your own successor!
Seriously, this constantly happens when people decide to leave their employment to go out on their own. It happened with me when I quit my 9-5 to take the plunge, and I've seen it happen with every other person I've directly witnessed quitting a job to pursue contracting full time (three total, other than myself.)
I have arranged this with a few employees from both directions when a replacement was not found in time. ...) on-boarding gradually is easier. You probably can't do more then a handful of days this way but but a few days is much better than none.
Start doing a few days at your new job early (before the agreed upon date) they don't have to be in a row.
And return these days after a replacement has been found (but no more then two months after you start the new job or such like).
The new employer is likely to agree, it allows you to get into things sooner, and can prevent first week stagnation since you will be on boarding gradually.
It is common after the first day on the job the new boss realizes he isn't quite ready(accounts, training materials, computer, first assignment,
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.
use some tool to convert the mail to html and then some other tool to make it searchable, pat yourself on the back and call it done. if you really wanted a knowledge base you would have built one a long time ago. now it's just a makework project.
On the other hand, if you need something to do, do the first part and then proceed to build an intelligent index of the contents in the CMS of your choice.
Either way, preserving the emails themselves preserves context which might help later technicians comprehend the situation better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A handy program is ABC Amber. It can convert a variety of email archives(outlook, BlackBerry, Groupwise etc) into a number of different formats including HTML and PDFs. The PDF feature is nice as it links to the attachments. It allows bulk operations and seems to be very fast.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Um... archive it and let them search it? Lol
NO. Do not.
Your company has a data retention/destruction policy. Any of your emails can come up in a lawsuit against the company in the future, for example, which is almost certainly why they have a policy of destroying data. Do NOT violate their data policy without permission in writing that you keep a record of in your personal files. You don't want to get stuck with the bill for a lawsuit, or be known as the person responsible for the company losing one.
Just raw copy the bytes to his drive. It's always a solid plan!
Pretty accurate description of what will happen. When somebody leaves the company, everything that goes wrong for several months later was 100% their fault. I've done outrageously thorough documentation of mechanical systems with Solidworks assemblies. Told the first person to replace me where they were. They leave several months later and don't tell the next sucker. I come back a year later and they're essentially banging rocks together with cardboard and PVC pipe because no one knew how to open the .sldasm file... It was a very surreal "The Gods Must Be Crazy"/"cargo cult" experience seeing how pointless it was to try to build a legacy.
Your "legacy" is just a hindrance to the ambitions of the guy who comes in after you in most cases. No glory to be found in making use of it. Plenty of "knight-in-shining-armor" stories to be found in slandering your name. Who sings praises for their fiance's ex-boyfriends?
Your successor will then have an excellent opportunity to learn by doing.
Emacs org-mode with gpg files. It's the only way to be sure.
It is no longer your problem.
no matter what you do whoever takes your place is going to have to stand the process his or her own way. As the say, the graveyard is full of people who were thought of as irreplaceable...
Peace, or Not?
I guess the cron job to DBAN all the servers never kicked in.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I've been with my employer for 12 years and have a lot of specialised knowledge. In that time I've diligently shuttled information from various sources including e-mail into a wiki. Anyone in the company can access and edit it but I'm by far the biggest contributor. Time and time again I'm able to send people a link to answer their FAQs, heck I even use it to discover my own (forgotten) memories. Thanks to the wiki I anticipate a straightforward handover should the need arise.
Hillary Clinton?
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Write as useful of a summary as you can in the time you can spare, print it out, and put it where the new hire is certain to find it because someone dropped into the deep end is unlikely to have the time to do discovery on a collection of mailboxes.
I have quickly exported GBs of emails (with or without folder structure) from Outlook/Exchange using MessageSave... www.techhit.com/messagesave ...to reliable msg files on the hard drive. I then indexed them with X1... www.x1.com
Disagree strongly. Email is highly searchable by keyword and even phrases . Very useful stuff is in that email and the OP is doing the right thing.
Ever since Sendmail 1983 came along it's also been trivial to use any shell to copy the contents of one mailbox into another - but in this case since the mailboxes are not separate files the user is probably better off not fucking about with commands to manipulate email in an obfiscated database with other people's stuff in it and instead export directly from their mail client.
If they know what they are doing, know that there is a very recent backup and they are the person that will clean up the mess, fine, otherwise it's not something to be recommended.
Who sings praises for their fiance's ex-boyfriends?
My ex-wife's new husband sang my praises much to her dismay :-)
(Nice guy, as I eventually found out. Drove a daihatsu (sp?)).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
If the role is really THAT specialized, then presumably they have agreed some kind of agreement where the new hire can call you during their first 6 months(?) of ramp up time, when they have questions (and that should be something they compensate you for in an appropriate and mutually agreed manner). Aside from that, securing the knowledge base is vital, so your manager (and the manager/owner of the system you are supporting, if that is not your manager) need to request/authorize the retention of your email account beyond the 90 day period. Typically that would involve getting IT to transfer ownership of the mailbox over to the manager/owner, and when the new hire starts granting access to them.
As long as they advise you in writing that, as of your last day on the job, you forfeit ownership, control, access and rights to all content of your mailbox and get your signature to agree to that, most HR departments and HR legal specialists will be ok with that afaik.
Once the knowledge base is out of your hands, it ceases to be your problem though, so management need to own the process of securing and preserving the knowledge, something they seem to have done a piss poor job of to date.
The best way to ensure the person gets the emails in a nice readable form is to export them to a PST file. Burn it on a DVD and give it to your manager and say exactly what it is and why you did it. Then the rest is up to him.
...and I know that some companies block PST creation in Outlook. No problem. Just a registry value. Google it if you need it.
Dump your mail to mbox, filter and format the mbox dump with regexes, as to make it more readable.
Save it as a regular textfile.
Tell your successor he can search that for keywords if he suspects an answer in there.
That shouldn't take you more than a day or two, perhaps only 2 hours or so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Well, maybe this is kind of a dumb one but first of all save all of your email into a PST file (of sorts) or what ever best fits your current email client and back it up so your successor has it available, and then you can try uploading it to gmail I've found its really good on searching thru old emails and getting results. Maybe is just a dumb option but may help. Best of luck.
Tell management to stop playing with a Truck Number of 1. During the ramp up of the new guy, with or without your knowledgebase, they'll be in trouble. They'll want the new guy up to speed in day one, and he might not be up to speed in six months after you leave. And he might leave too if management stresses him out trying to get your performance out of him. Note: I am such a special snowflake in my organisation too, so I'm projecting. But in my case the company would just shut and everybody else would go home (they're all ex-bankers, now otherwise retired). If they were to get a replacement for me the guy would have to read a fuckton of source code, the same way I did, before he can do my job. And it took me about 6 years to understand what I'm doing, as it's not my baby. It was somebody else's, and that guy didn't like to share his thought process even though we worked on this for 4 years in the beginning before we parted ways.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Archive your email using MailStore - I use the home version
http://www.mailstore.com/en/ma...