Part 2 of 4:

4 Key Lessons in IT – Note Taking:

Note taking and documentation is a critical skill that is often overlooked by many IT professionals and should be one of the top skills in your repertoire.

During our conversation, Compass’ mother asked me to repeat the name of the security certification. So I mentioned to Compass that she should be the one asking questions and how important it is to take notes, especially when you have a professional in the field your looking to get into is offering you guidance.

Note taking is an extremely important skill and very valuable as only 4% of organizations have complete IT documentation. As I’m writing this I received a call from a potential customer who said I was highly recommended by a friend of hers and requested our help. I asked for the name of the reference and wasn’t familiar with him. I checked a few of my resources and found that he was an employee of a customer I’ve recently helped quickly resolve a major issue they were having for years. This was important because they had a very similar issue and the fact that I was highly recommended by an employee spoke volumes of the level of service we provide.

All too often in IT, the infrastructure team appears invisible to the users because we manage the backend environments like, security, networking, wireless, applications, voice and video, virtualization, etc. For most users, as long as the services are running efficiently they don’t realize we exist and when an issue does occur, we resolve it without them knowing it. Also the average person doesn’t understand the different roles in IT, especially infrastructure. See the blog (The Future of IT).

As I was gathering information and taking notes, they didn’t have any documentation and couldn’t answer more than 80% of the questions I asked. They mentioned that they had previous companies that couldn’t fix the issue even after replacing equipment. My first recommendation was that we start with a discovery first, before implementing any solutions to your problems and explained that without notes or documentation it was hard to see why these companies would replace your equipment and not provide you with documentation or even design notes.

I believe the reason they had the so many lingering problems, that all of the previous IT companies couldn’t resolve was simply because didn’t have any detailed documentation. It’s hard to identify problems when you don’t fully understand what you have, why you have it, how it is configured. Simply knowing the reason why something was done can help significantly, because a lot of designs are based on the current needs of the business at a specific point in time. It could be financial constraints, resource limitations, lack of planning and also bad design. All IT infrastructure should be documented with design notes and reviewed at least annually as technology evolves quickly. A design or process that works well one year may not be viable a few years later which is why it’s good to have a summary of the design in the documentation to help future engineers and team members understand why a particular design was chosen. A lot of times networks and IT infrastructure are inherited by a new replacement engineer without anyone understanding the original / current design many times lead to high turn-over rates as engineers are left to fend for themselves to keep a sinking structure afloat while adding more technology on top of it. This is a hidden cost that normally goes undetected until it’s too late and costly.

Someone sent me a video where rapper and executive producer 50 Cent was mentoring a young rapper named Pop Smoke. The whole time 50 cent was talking, it appeared that Pop Smoke was playing on his phone not paying attention to the valuable information being shared about the music business. 50 Cent was curious as to why he was so into his phone that he got up, walked over to him and looked at his screen. To 50 Cent’s surprise, Pop Smoke was taking notes on everything 50 Cent was telling him. 50 Cent was highly impressed that he took detailed notes and said that he was special.

Note taking and documentation is a critical skill that is often overlooked by many IT professionals and should be one of the top skills in your repertoire.

Key Questions:

  1. Do you typically take notes on your own without being asked or reminded?
  2. Have you ever found yourself to be the only one taking notes?
  3. Think back at a time when you received valuable information but didn’t takes notes. How much of the information do you clearly remember?
    1. How much do you think you would remember if you had detailed notes?
  4. For fun: Do you know what you ate for dinner on a Friday 3 months from now?
    1. How about 3 years ago?
    2. If you had detailed notes or documentation would you be able to find out?