Ask Slashdot: IT Staff Handovers -- How To Take Over From an Outgoing Sys Admin?

Solar1ze writes "I've just started a role in an IT services firm. I'm required to take over from an incumbent who has been in the position for three years. What are some of the best practices for knowledge transfer you have used when you've taken over from another IT staff member? How do you digest the thousands of hosts, networks and associated software systems in a week, especially when some documentation exists, but much of it is still in the mind of the former worker?"

Re:Start with Foundational Systems: Network, DNS,

[skids]

Yep, whenever you change core IT people, you have them do a sloppy braindump if possible before they leave, and you clear the new guy from almost every task save updating the documentation and diagrams, with a few mundane tasks thrown in to get procedures down. This means you postpone your big projects if you have a staff change instead of expecting the new guy to shoulder that. Skillsets are not the same as in-situ knowlege.

Re:There is only one way...

[cusco]

One more thing that I would add, something non-technical, is ask the outgoing guy who in the organization has caused him the most problems. It might just be the idiot CFO who thinks the Sys Admin is the one that needs to fix his laptop when the latest version of AOL has hosed it, or the branch manager whose answer to every network issue is to yank the power plug on the router to reboot it, but sometimes it can be more troublesome, like the mainframe admins who deliberately try to obstruct projects carried out by the Windows admins. Get a really good handle on the workflow, ticket tracking, and reporting requirements as well (I didn't and am still floundering sometimes).

Re:There is only one way...

[ICLKennyG]

I would argue that the best way to ensure they leave happy is to pre-pay some token amount of that contract. Nothing ownerous, but say 2 days salary/16 hours up front would be an excellent way to grease the wheels. If you are of sufficient size, the roughly $500-$1000 parting gift is a small price to pay for an enterprise phone-a-friend life-line.

Hopefully, they are leaving as an advancement not out of recourse. As someone in the incumbent situation right now with evenly mixed feelings, a small olive branch saying "we know we will be at a disadvantage without you and would like to buy 8-24 hours of your time when you have it available over the next 6 months, keep it anyway if we don't," would go an awful long way to helping me answer a phone call or any other question that isn't oh yea the password is 'RumSkittles3242#$@%_god'. That said, without that, if anyone besides my supervisor calls when (not if) the project they are working on fails, I'm going to say "HAHA, told you so!" and hang up.

Re:There is only one way...

[Common Joe]

I was a programmer for a small firm when I gave my two weeks. I offered them to come by now and again on on Saturdays or answer questions they may have had. Although they didn't call me often and I gladly went over there a few times, I did have to put my foot down and ask them to stop calling me after 6 months. I thought that was enough time for a transition and I only offered my services to be nice... not as a permanent solution to their inability to hire enough people to read and parse my code. The company didn't really want to look at my code or study it or become familiar with it until they needed a change and then they called me up so I could explain things to them. After reflection, I think most companies would either abuse my kind of offer or never call. Would I do it all over again? Yes. I'm a nice guy at heart and I'd make the same offer to the same people. They were a good bunch to work with.

I put this out here as a tidbit of info for others thinking about doing this.