Hi guys, I recently started working at a company with about 50 people that has grown to large for their current IT setup. They have no documentation or any SOPs. Has anyone been in a similar situation and how did you go about creating documentation, especially when you are new and don’t fully understand all of the services they have in place?
Thankfully it’s mostly a Microsoft shop and pretty low tech but there are dozens of exchange rules in place that no one knows why they exist or what they do, dozens of SharePoint sites with critical information strewn about them and so on. It’s hard to think where to even start and decide what the best way to organize this information will be, and keep in a place a system where we will update it regularly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
I’m partial to infrastructure as code techniques as a way of writing things down and tracking changes, but that’s obviously not always possible in corporate IT with “edge computing”.
If you’re documenting something related to code or a specific computer, I think readme .md files are the best, because you can’t lose them.
If you’re writing pure documentation, there are really nice markdown site generators like docusaurus, but if you’re just making internal documentation, you can just file everything with an online cloud documentation tool like Notion or even Google Docs. If you want online documents like Google docs, but you don’t want Google to have all your secrets, you can run your own corporate Nextcloud server, which is very common in Europe.
One thing that worked for me in a similar situation was to enforce an “owner” tag or some kind of registry on everything.
Basically, if you set something up, change some configuration, whatever - put your email address on it.
Write a readme.md or wiki or guide too, but at the very minimum put your name down as the owner so that when someone comes along and wants to know if it’s safe to change/upgrade/delete, they can find you and ask. If someone leaves, you can do a quick search and get them to handover/write up anything they were responsible for.