Documentation systems and operations: A network infrastructure case study
I put this case study together to show how I actually work when I'm handed a documentation space nobody owns: how I figure out what's still true, decide what to keep, and build something that doesn't fall apart again six months after I move on.
The scenario is fictional – built around the kind of network infrastructure documentation you'd find at a trading firm or any technology-heavy financial services team – but the method is exactly what I'd bring to a real one. I've invented the specifics; the approach is mine.
The setup
Picture a Network Infrastructure team's Confluence space that's been running for six years with no dedicated owner. Engineers say they can never find the right page. The people who actually know how things work keep it in their heads, in old tickets, in Slack threads that scroll away. I was brought in to fix that – not by rewriting everything from scratch, but by working out what was actually still true first.
What's in here
- Auditing an Existing Documentation Space – how I worked out what to keep, what to merge, and what to retire
- Redesigning the Space Structure – the structure I landed on, and the one I tried first that didn't work
- Sample SOP Template – one runbook, written the way I'd want it if I were the person on call at 3 AM
- Ownership & Review Model – how the space stays accurate after I'm not the one checking it every week
- Finding and Fixing a Broken Process – a workflow problem worth watching for, and the fix I put in place for it
How this maps to DMAIC
I'm not Six Sigma certified, but the shape of this work follows the DMAIC framework enough that it's worth naming: Define the problem (no owner, duplicated and contradicted pages – see the audit), Measure the scope of it (83 pages assessed, 19 ownerless, each scored across seven risk dimensions – also in the audit), Analyze why it kept happening even after ownership was assigned on paper (see Finding and Fixing a Broken Process), Improve with a redesigned structure and a working template (see Structure and the SOP Template), and Control it with a review cycle and escalation model built to survive me not being the one checking it (see Ownership & Review Model). I didn't set out to run a DMAIC cycle – it's just what auditing and fixing a broken system tends to look like once you name the steps.
This is representative work, not a real employer's confidential content. I built it to show how I think through documentation systems and operations work, end to end.