TMC's Advisor

The Advisor is published by TMC

Does Your IT Staff Know Too Much?

Consider your day to day operations – you’re rushing around, “putting out fires”, and working to restore normal operations. Where do you get the information that you use to reset or replace and reconfigure your equipment – from existing documentation or from someone’s head? Is vital information resident in someone’s head that is not written down? What will happen if they aren’t there?

By Johnnie Denton

Johnnie Denton is the editor of The Advisor, a researcher, and oversees TMC benchmarking studies.

Like Flossing Teeth

Everyone agrees that creating documentation is a good thing to do, like flossing your teeth, yet many people don’t do enough of it. We often see this when we’ve been engaged to conduct an IT assessment or audit and we ask for documentation.

The reason is that IT departments often don’t schedule time for staff to dedicate to creating or updating their documentation, Staff are expected to fit it in between other work. The other reason is that it can be hard to decide what kind of documentation is worth creating and how detailed it should be.

What to Document?

First think about why we need documentation. It should provide enough information for a new employee or contractor to perform a task or troubleshoot and correct a problem.

If you have single sources of knowledge, where one person is the database expert and someone else knows firewalls, for example, and that knowledge is not documented, you’re at high risk of knowledge loss if that knowledge source changes jobs or otherwise becomes unavailable.

You can build your documentation list by comparing existing documentation to the knowledge held by each member of the IT staff and management. The highest priority IT documentation is troubleshooting and recovery procedures. Secondary priorities are for single knowledge-source, undocumented procedures or drawings.

What Do You Need?

We suggest that you develop the following IT related documentation:

The Process

The fastest way to write documentation is to ask a knowledge-holder to describe the process, record it and convert it to text. It’s usually 80% complete at that point.

Then you review the documentation with the knowledge holder as well as a few non-experts in the department. Finally, schedule an annual review.

If you’d like to discuss how to improve your IT documentation or processes or to comment on this article, contact me at .

This article was published in the November 2023 edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:10 Issue:6

©2023 TMC Consulting