The Guru is In...and You!

One of the options during each of the technical sessions is called "The Guru Is In." These are informal sessions with an expert in a particular topic relevant to sysadmins. Guru sessions are a great opportunity to discuss ongoing issues that you're actually experiencing. The best part is that there's not just one guru -- the other attendees are gurus as well. Those who attend to ask questions often find themselves answering the questions of others. While training sessions and the other technical sessions provide great information, the guru sessions are uniquely able to address your own specific bothers.

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending two excellent guru sessions. The first, starring Oracle's Janice Gelb, focused on documentation. Her opening remarks included comments about the weaknesses of wikis as documentation repositories. This reinforces comments made by Mark Burgess in his Tuesday morning training: "wikis are where knowledge goes to die." Janice suggests that wikis be used for interactive work, but that more authoritative documentation be maintained.

In order to keep documentation up-to-date, a culture of documentation must be fostered. This requires scheduling regular updates and maintenance of documentation. Management must also be convinced of the value of maintaining documentation.

In the afternoon, Tom Limoncelli held a session on time management. Tom, of course, is a leading expert in the field, having published a book and presented several trainings at LISA conferences. Sysadmins, being chronically short of time, packed the room to learn and discuss.

Tom began with five keys to managing time:

• Create a mutual interruption shield
• Turn chaos into routines
• Record all requests, don’t rely on your brain
• Make 365 to-do lists a year
• Document the procedures you hate

Unlike the earlier guru, Tom advocated wikis to document tasks and procedures. Checklist-type procedures and infrequent, error-prone tasks are especially suitable to be documented. This task list can serve as a list of tasks to delegate to junior admins and can be a guide for writing job descriptions.

Tom advocates making a to-do list for every day of the year. Any unfinished items should be carried forward to the next day. A large number of applications exist to help with this, although a simple text editor or even pen-and-paper are well-suited for to-do list management.

Managers can make it easier for their staff to by setting three policies:

• How to get help (hey, file a ticket!)
• Written definition of what constitutes an emergency.
• Scope of support