fighting the lack of good ideas
I had a decent library of documentation, templates, hand-offs, slide decks, etc in my pre-Splunk consulting life (technically, I still have them). It’s nice to be finally getting a decent collection to draw from for my customers in my post-automation consulting life.
In a recent episode of Paul’s Security Weekly, an off-hand comment was made about documentation: you shouldn’t merely document what to do, nor even why, but also what you tried that didn’t work (ie, augment the status quo). The upshot being, to save whomever comes to this note next (especially if it turns out to be yourself) effort you spent that…
Documentation is vital. There’s never enough. And there’s always too much. In general, these are the areas I find documentation to fail: Not Enough Too Much/Many why-tos (instead of how-tos) tutorials on things you need architecture explanation design philosophy “how we got here” “why we are here” future plans / roadmaps deltas from standards recording…
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In my line of work, I often need to create documentation for clients. Documentation in general is a Good Thing™. But good documentation’s goal should always be to augment and improve upon what already exists – not to supplant, downgrade, or muddle what already exists. A prime example of this has come up with a…
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Knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have written about various aspects of it before. The most vital commodity any organization has is the knowledge of its members – it does not matter if it is a historical society, company, church, or school: the organizational knowledge…
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