Where was this 2 years ago?
When I was switching jobs, leaving a place where I was the only IT person and trying to document everything I did and leave instructions about how to do it, I seriously could have used this Lifehack article about How to Give Instructions.
I can definitely attest to how difficult it is to put yourself in the place of someone coming in with no knowledge of how to do something, when you’ve been doing it for so many years. I especially like the idea of documenting not just the procedures but also what to anticipate when it succeeds and what it will look like when something goes wrong. So often when dealing with some task we have done for years, we don’t think about how it looks when it fails, we just know the warning signs when we see them. That doesn’t really help someone doing it for the first time.
As tech support professionals, we should be documenting not just how to do something, but how to tell if it’s working, and what to do if it doesn’t. Too often, that information doesn’t get included, even though it sure would be helpful!
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