e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Production support woes

I haven't posted here for a while. That's because the guy that was doing most of our production support decided to retire and the vast majority of production support tasks got dropped on me. I'm sure you don't want to hear about the joys of manually entering 400+ locations that will be undergoing stocktake in the next few weekends...

Having said that, I'll turn this post into a call for better documentation. From everyone. Come on people, I know that writing documentation is a rather hated and shunned task, but you have to do it. If not, your company (well, probably not your company after you left and didn't document something well) is in trouble when a new person has to do that poorly documented task for the first time. Did I mention 400+ stocktake locations? You bet I did.

Years ago, we used to get technical writers in to do our documentation. I wonder if anyone remembers these people? Unless you've worked at a large software house, you've probably never met one. They do an awesome job. Interviewing the engineers that wrote the systems and translating it into information targetted at specific audiences. Unfortunately, most companies don't employ them. So how can we minimise the pain of documenting our systems and procedures?

One word: Wikis.

It used to be a bit difficult to set up a corporate wiki. But now you can get TurnKey MediaWiki software and be up and running in minutes. Now there's no excuse...