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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)?
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.
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!
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.
You know, creating a wiki for your employer a few weeks before they're no longer your employer is misguided and pointless.
Fixing everything the company failed to do now that you're leaving is a sucker's game of diminishing returns.
Taking on new projects to benefit them because nobody has figured out how to plan for your leaving? Well, sure if you think you want to start creating something like this now ... and which in all likelihood will go unused after you're gone.
Mostly you'll just throw good time after bad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
Hillary Clinton?
Ken
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.
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.