Does your job contain instruction manuals?

Jasiono

I was wondering if your company provides you with work instructions/manuals that tell you how to do your job.

Not sure if the company I work for has them due to them being ISO certified and I was curious.

I keep refraining from posting to positions outside the company I'm currently at because I feel as though I will be thrown to the fire. I know all the concepts to the jobs being posted around here but my lack of experience in turn causes my lack of knowing how to implement certain things.

For instance. I want to apply to security related positions but they want IPS and IDS knowledge and implementation of such. I know the theories behind them, what they do, I have never looked at implementing them. Never actually did it.

joehalford01

We don't have anything like that unless I wrote it to remember how I set it up at a later date....

Its a small company though, so I'm sure that's common with small companies. It takes a lot of resources to create and maintain your own library of IT manuals.

NetworkVeteran

I was wondering if your company provides you with work instructions/manuals that tell you how to do your job.

Most organizations have repetitive tasks, and when those are subject to scrutiny and/or shared by multiple people, will have or should have standards and/or processes. Now, they rarely will be of the level of detail of "Do x, then do y, then do z" unless they have little confidence in your individual abilities (fast food, retail, phone support). They may say though, to put on an ESD strap whenever you handle electronic equipment.. or to add a specific company logo to every e-mail that you send out.

dave330i

Closest would be Standard Operating Procedure.

CodeBlox

I was tasked with writing this sort of documentation for sysadmin work... Lots of "step by step" grunt work for building servers and whatnot... This was intended for the purposes of having someone new come in and be able to build a server without having to ask "what to do?".

thenjduke

I work for a large organization and we have SOP and Task List and learn each other platform on our team so we know we all can do each other jobs. It took awhile to get use to it but documentation is a huge help.

nosoup4u

Sure if you count a bunch of out of date knowledge bases and walk-through's for retired applications

Tackle

joehalford01 wrote: »

We don't have anything like that unless I wrote it to remember how I set it up at a later date....

Its a small company though, so I'm sure that's common with small companies. It takes a lot of resources to create and maintain your own library of IT manuals.

Same way at for me and the company I work for.

I use Evernote and keep a log of minor changes/information I may need later. Makes searching really quick. I had it in Word originally but once it reached 50 pages of 1 line bullet points I decided on Evernote. That 50 pages was 2 years ago. I bet it's over double the size now.

datacomboss

I've worked at many small, medium and large firms and many did not have much in the form of manuals.

Chitownjedi

At my current location they have about 60% of the things we may need to install documented.. but about 80% of that is outdated an no longer valid.

Danielm7

Mostly small shops here, so no manuals for me. One of the companies I worked at was bought out by a giant corp and we had to document a lot of it but it was mostly X task gets done on Y schedule, not so much a step by step plan on how to actually perform the task.

kurosaki00

Most jobs nowadays have Wikis
Usually you get the SOP for certain tasks instead of a manual for the whole job in general.

About7Narwhal

I went from an ITIL and ISO certified company to one with neither... Not only do I have poor documentation on day to day tasks (most of which is more than 5 years out of date and never updated after the initial posting) but I get performance reviews based on the information I don't have. How is someone supposed to exceed expectations when no one knows what the expectations are?

rensational

As far as IT jobs go, I've worked for a big company and a small company. I can't quite say we had manuals or documentation. At the small company, there was a wiki, but it seems like most people either never used it or were never even told about it (I was not told until months and months after I started the job). It was also incredibly outdated, so it was really of no help. At the big company, we sporadically receive documents shared with us through Gmail. It's actually more annoying than anything else because now I have 50 million separate docs and have very little idea what I actually have a doc on or how to quickly find a doc when it's needed (then people who sent the docs get irritated when you ask them a question about something that could be found in the docs). Plus, the docs cover nowhere near everything that would have helped me do my job when I first started. I was very much thrown into the fire at both places. A maintained wiki would be nice, and it'd be helpful to people coming in as new hires.

naclh2onaz

Yea we have a wiki at my job but if I dont know it and it isnt in the wiki im goin to google

DevilWAH

WE do have manuals / SOP's / documentation for setting up equipment and services. on top of the standard how to for things like setting up a user account or recovering an email.

however as the person who designs the network there not really such thing as a manual. I just have to try to make sure once I have finished installing it and its ready to go live I write up to instructions for the ops team of how to use it.

PurpleIT

My desktop guy has screen-shots of EVERY step for installing and configuring apps while on the network side of things I tend to keep more of a journal. I figure if I have to explain step-by-step how to set a switchport to trunk VLANs 5, 15 and 172 then the person reading it won't know why that needs to be done let alone how to deal with anything that may go wrong.

I typically make a journal for each device or site (I am small enough I can do it this way), with entries like, "Made port 5 on switch ABC-XY-1 a trunk for VLANs 5, 15 and 172 (native is 5). Connected it to switch DEF-QR-3, port 17 to pass traffic for Blah, Blah and Blah". This gives a quick summary of why I did things, what the goal is and by keeping the entries sequentially it is its own change log.

I'd rather make a full set of documentation for the network, but this is still more than I got when I took this job.

DevilWAH

Like Purple, I assume a level of expertise when writing up documentation.

Its like writing driving instructions for some one, I put down the names of the road and what way to turn, I assume they can drive the car with out me needing to tell them what gear they should be in, or they need to use the indicator.

Same with my network, I will tell record what virtual IP to use for HSRP redundence and the timers and ip SLA / interface trackert, but I expect the person to know how to configure it. The most you will get is "it is configured under the interface" or "under global config" and to be honest that's mostly to remind my self

powerfool

My job is writing that stuff... so yes, it exists.

blargoe

For thing that I implement, I create SOP documentation that is more in line with IT Operations use, and design/config documentation tends to be more high level, assuming a certain level of expertise.

N2IT

All of the projects I have been apart of build out a procedure handbook that captures all the processes the why and the procedures the how. Documentation and knowledge sharing is critical and worth it's weight in gold.