We’ve got a severe problem at my company. Management doesn’t want to invest the time or resources to developing a standardized training manual, training material, or even a Lessons Learned catalog, and everytime we get a new employee it’s like 6 months of them slowly picking things up before they are useful and probably a year and half before they got comfortable in their role.
Did any of you have this hurdle? And how did you get management to finally listen and invest the resources to do this properly?
We have Quality Documentation and flowcharts of what processes are to be performed, but how we specifically handle those processes is lacking. If we lost our senior engineers, the whole thing would come crashing down. We have no searchable database of past projects, so you can’t easily search for similar designs unless someone specifically knows what project code to give you. Our drawing practices are not standardized. We have dozens of excel sheets that document critical information but there’s no organized locations for any of them. Any attempt to organize our materials database gets shot down as a waste of time.
The list goes on and on…
Ah. Is there no company wiki? (Like a Confluence or even Mediawiki or something where you can just go… make a new page and type things that everyone else can see?) Do you have a company Git host like Bitbucket or Gitlab or something, and if so, does it have “gists” or “snippets” or something like that? (I know Bitbucket has snippets.)
Without knowing more about how the tech is set up where you work if you don’t have a network share available, you might be able to literally put a shared directory on one of your work machines where all the documents live. You might be able to search that via the Windows filesystem search feature.
A git repo may work as well. Git and large files don’t really get along, and I don’t know how big these files are, but if it’s the best you have to work with, it’s far better than nothing.
So, I guess what I’m saying is: if you just find a place to dump files that lets you either search the contents or share the whole set of files with everyone on the team so they can search the files locally, that may be the option that’s near zero effort/time and will at least give you… not a “database” per se, but at least a searchable repository.