Knowledge Sharing, Value, and Visibility of an Internal Documentation Team

Abstract

Support engineers who work in the cloud at Company X use runbooks (troubleshooting and howto guides) to resolve alarms. Each alarm is linked to a runbook. Runbooks are the universal tool that support engineers use to resolve an alarm and avoid negatively impacting the customer. Presently there are 45,000 runbooks at Company X. The Runbook Champion pilot was created to address quality issues with service teams runbooks, explore how knowledge was shared among teams, and how the internal documentation team could increase their visibility and value among the service teams. Three service teams participated in the pilot, which consisted of two focus groups and required the teams to run two different runbook validation scripts on the service team’s runbook libraries. Data was gathered from the focus groups, and from two different runbook validation scripts. The focus group questions evaluated the service team’s knowledge of runbooks, tools, how teams created and maintained their runbook library, expectations of the pilot, challenges, and what was learned. The focus groups revealed a lack of visibility of the internal documentation team and the tools and resources that are available. Service teams did not have a process for maintaining and auditing their runbook libraries and knowledge sharing among the service teams was undermined by team reorganization, force reduction, and new hires. The runbook validation scripts identified quality issues with the service teams runbooks which created an efficient way to manage a runbook library.