Documentation Ideas
Forward looking documentation can greatly assist you in retaining important knowledge.
- Have staff develop and regularly update procedure manuals
- Conduct departmental exit interviews to include continuity of technological knowledge and preservation of technical documentation
- Identify a documentation resource person within your department to assist other staff in doing proper new hire and system’s documentation.
- On major experiments with outside collaborators, make arrangements to capture their knowledge.
- Ask your departing employees to formulate a list of the 10 most important phone numbers or contacts (e.g., employees, users, vendors, retirees) that a new hire in their position might utilize.
- When no overlap between departing and arriving employees is possible, arrange through the Communications Office to have the departing employee answer a few job critical questions on videotape for the new employee’s information. Frank Topper, a professional facilitator, is available to assist with the formulation of the questions.
- Identify staff that possess information critical to your area and develop a plan to capture their knowledge. Frank Topper can also assist with this.
- In developing a project, incorporate documentation into the project plan,
including as-built documentation. The Mechanical Design Department has the
capability to convert drawings into an easily savable and accessible format.
- In developing a project, it is essential to incorporate accurate and complete documentation into the project plan, including as-built documentation. The cost savings in repeatable manufacturing, as well as in downstream maintenance and system modification, far outweigh the costs of proper documentation at design time. The Mechanical Design (MD) Department can provide many services towards this end, including the conversion of many third-party drawing types into an easily savable, searchable, and viewable format.
- MD can convert many CAD file formats into the SLAC-standard Solid Edge format, which allows downstream modification of the files. They can also save most other digital file formats as .tif or .pdf files and can manually scan any paper documents smaller than 3 X 12 ft. If necessary, any of these converted files can be embedded in a standard SLAC drawing format and assigned a standard SLAC drawing number for inclusion in their file management systems. The resulting files can be searched and viewed online through MD's search and viewing tools. A charge number is required to make use of these file conversion services.
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