Documentation, it's not optional!
Anyone who says the team working or osmosis method of passing on knowledge is definitely the best method needs to have a long hard look at themselves.
Yes, I'm sure there's a small minority of situations that work better in person, but we're IT workers, discussing topics on an IT site. We're supposed to make this work!
I've been in both situations, and for the 'grabbing someone for osmosis' method
Has minor advantages that you can 'see' if someone is busy (but that's fairly equivalent to an online status, and in both cases they may tell you go away)
If they're next to you, they may proactively notice you need help
There can be some advantages purely in being in the same room as someone for human interaction
The 'water cooler' situation. Personally I've found this to be extremely rare, and just as prevalent or better online, your mileage may vary.
I'm struggling to find more than that. Disadvantages are legion :
Explanation is usually oral, you need to implement and remember, or document immediately.
Just because osmosis *can* happen, does not mean it does
If a knowledge holder leaves, their knowledge leaves with them. Been there, done that, had to learn from scratch myself on numerous occasions.
Once *you* leave, knowledge leaves with you, you need to replicate the osmosis training to others whilst you're working. Each new person doing the same training..
For properly organised training (which is not specifically WFH related, but greatly helps for it)
There is some existing documentation
Knowledge gaps are determined based on support cases, customer demand, and new features
Time should be allocated for writing documentation. This is an integral part of working, not something thrown together in five minutes.
This *will* impact on other work tasks
There are both documents, and procedures. Procedures should ideally include logging and saving of data
It's also iterative - so if the documentation or procedure is created and is unclear, it is clarified or training is provided, until it can be handled.
This ideally only needs to be done once (reality is different, but that's the ideal).
Management needs to accept that as mentioned creating this takes time, but also some situations are simply not applicable for a standard procedure, they require background experience.
It's also true, that regardless of the knowledge transfer process. Some people are simply better at working out issues from the information available. Whether in person, or online, some people will progress a request based on a minimal amount of information. Others will fail to progress, despite a series of clear unambiguous steps. The trick is to maximise what can be achieved starting from a lower level of experience.
Note also, that whatever your level of experience, you *will* forget things after a while unless you're using them every day. Self written documentation helps you too when you forget, and having to codify knowledge into a procedure can involve learning new technologies (viz recently-ish I created a procedure I would personally have used awk to resolve in PowerShell instead, having to learn how to achieve the same result. Mostly, Powershell was an advantage (although the absence of NF in Powershell needed to be worked around), and it looks much less like line noise)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
