- Doh! Moment alert. -
For the past one and a half years I’ve been working in a team that gets a lot of troubleshooting shots (pun intended). Dozens of deployed systems with many similarities and even more differences that need some fix from time to time. There is a loose coupling between systems and maintainers which means that I can get to fix a system of which I know almost nothing in which case I must get much of the crucial info from the guy that is most onto that system. Most of the fixes are quite small – the kind of work that gets done in a matter of minutes – if you know what to do.
Anyway, it’s a matter of how to share knowledge bits easy and fast which was being done via emails and notes (i.e. not easy and not fast). I generally hate to do a job more than once and my memory sucks so you can imagine how I felt when I went through a whole troubleshooting session just to learn that the guy next to me had done the same thing two months ago and had the solution ready…aaaaargh!
Well – after all that’s why we got computers and networks and the whole lot in the first place, right? To have them remember things that we might forget and to share these things with whomever we want. So, why were we fighting with paper notes and prehistoric emails (OK, that’s slightly anachronistic, I admit)? I gathered my courage, wore my blue/red uniform and declare “I will save the world!”.
In short I advocated for a system where we could write small note-like messages regarding the cases we dealt with. The system had to be private, searchable, easy to use, quick and easy to back up. After a little thought I decided to give the very same wordpress platform where you’re reading this, a try. And it worked! Hosted on my ubuntu-PC, with add-ons to provide privacy and ease of back-up, fully searchable out of the box and kickass beautiful. Of course I’ll have to persuade everyone into using it or it will become yet another nice dinosaur on my desk but despite all these practicalities I feel that I pushed knowledge management one centimeter closer to perfection – maybe I should write a paper on it.
Ta daam!
KIVA
One Laptop Per Child
What you have there is a DIY Case Management system.
Someone worked on a problem ages ago and has a solution or some other useful insight. They can add it as a post (you can call it a “ticket” or “case” as in a proper CM) and tag it with the platform, software involved etc… Or you can create a category for each system and tag it with the problem description when posting.
Any additional info on the same system or problem can be added in the comments. You can call them “notes”.
Don’t worry, they’ll start using it when they realize it only makes sense.
Well everyone was quite excited about and we already have about a dozen tags in there but …ehm… we also have to put content in if it’s gonna be of any use. I’m thinking about a super-easy way for a super-drowning user to track of what s/he is doing. Quite possibly writing down a draft post will be more than s/he can take in the heat of the day. Maybe a side project of speech to text recognition coupled with some soft AI module to put the tags on and keep an eye on user’s console in order to track important commands…OK I’m kidding. We just have to write something even if it’s of the form mrng lx bx ded cuase proc A ate mem fix asap (whatever that means).
PS: DIY Case Management System – Damn, that sounds really good for just a blog
Haha!
You can really have the next best thing to AI + text recognition, if you make the theme simple to use with virtually all “blog-like” stuff stripped down as much as possible.
If you put on the P2 theme for example, people can use the tag RSS feeds on the sidebar to keep track of a relevant system. You may want to make the textbox a little bigger. Best of all, anyone logged in as an author can post immediately rather than heading over to the backend (which you may want to limit anyway).
Whoa! Thanks man! Will definitely try it.