Location: The Working Centre 58 Queen Street South, Kitchener, ON (plan)
Date: September 19th, 2016
Time: 7:00 PM
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Smooth Succession
=================### Future session: Documentation – What do you document? – What tools do you use? ### Future session? Coming up with time/effort estimates? ### Questions – Have you taken over from another person leaving? What was helpful? What was frustrating? Our IT hats – Schoolteachers: often one person gets picked to wear the IT hat – Small non-for-profit, 25 staff – Approaches to succession at a large company – Another co-op job was not as smooth – He was working for a small startup where the emphasis was getting things as soon as possible with no succession of any kind – Succession horror stories (small nonprofits) – When going to new organizations – He worked for an insurance company. Their disaster planning was based on insurance. |
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| Paul N. |
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– Worked for a university press
+ He kept the job for 30 years + He had a lot of autonomy in writing his job descriptions + Early on they had their own UNIX system and some people on Windows using UNIX tools * User training was not difficult because typographers know how to type to get stuff done + But in 1999 things changed. Kids these days! They only know how to use word processors + Passing on old skills was hard + When he went on leave he hired a friend who knew the same skills + When he was getting closer to retiring there were a lot of meetings about the stuff he did. Other people were learning this but others didn’t think they could handle the whole thing. * The people who took his job have good communication skills and could change things to their preferences * He found that his meetings were collaborative and good for problem solving + Things are going well but are slower * eg there are fewer spreadsheet manipulation abilities + There is documentation in wikis. People can read them but not write to them easily. + Have others dismantled your work since you left? * Yes * They were thinking of shutting down the Linux servers * They were going to migrate the functionality to a virtual machine * The server ran for a year without being rebooted and continued to work + Working with text files on local servers can be simpler than the cloud, because of black boxes * He had a lot of discipline to the structure of the data * black box: you have a promise of input and output, but you don’t know what is happening inside * If the input data changes then everything can get messed up * Can you troubleshoot problems when they come up * Black boxes mean you can change the inputs and examine the outputs, but this is trial and error- Is there good software for putting bounding box information on EPS information. He found a script that worked that was made of Perl and shell script. – At TWC Best Practices – Mind the bus factor and stay away from public transportation – Having good documentation is helpful. How does it get created? – Never admit you know computers – How do you keep documentation up to date as things change? – Make documentation accessible – Get good at trawling other people’s work – Do regular training for staff and volunteers – Start people small if you can – Make new people do documentation as they work Worries and Challenges – Being the person who gets hit by the bus – People think that the cloud solves backups and IT administration – How hard will it be to step into a new position? – How many times will you be called after you left? – Choosing the wrong successor could be a disaster – Finding time/resources to transfer knowledge – How do you learn the system while being careful and not destroying everything in a burning ball of flame – Sometimes contractors get commissions with promises they cannot keep |
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