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Effective information search at work

Recently, I began to notice more that people cannot find the necessary information themselves. Instead of looking for her, they start asking in general chats or someone directly. In most cases, this additionally distracts from work and, as a result, any task is simply blocked until the time when someone does not help the author or indicates where to look. Quite a long time ago, I identified steps for myself that help me get the information I need. It often surprises me that most do not use it.

For an example, we will take abstract DevOps. Its task is to understand that some server is not working. Often I see that instead of trying to find the necessary information on his own, he asks it from other people. Or even worse, if the team members are in different time zones (10 hours difference, for example), then the devops just waits for a person to wake up who, in his opinion, knows the answers to his questions. And after all, all this could have been avoided if the devops just knew where to look:

  1. Jira or other tracking system: search for a ticket by server ip, server name or application name. In general, a search on any familiar unique information about the target system. In the comments to the tickets, people describe what they did, why and where. Jira is not only a system where it is marked how many points the task will take and who will do it is indicated, it is also a huge storehouse of information about different systems, a description of past problems and, most importantly, what has been done. And if you're lucky, you might find technical details there too. In most cases, this information will be enough for our devops to solve the problem.
  2. If nothing was found in Jira, then it's worth looking in Slack or another messenger that your team uses. Choose the most suitable channel where your target server was possibly discussed and start searching again for unique key information. Use different spellings: ip through a dash, domain name, short domain name, unofficial server name or even the name of the project and application. If in Jira tickets there is not enough information about what has been done, then it is worth looking for the name of the ticket. Although messengers are not the best place to store details, people still leave information only there and do not transfer it to tickets. I saw huge threads in Slack, in which there was a lot of information about the task, including technical details and discussions about why such and absolutely empty tickets were made in Jira.
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  12. If you have a common file storage for the entire company, then try searching there too. Most likely the search will be only by the name of the documents, so use the name of the project, repository, application, or something else that can be in the name in the search.

Everything described above should be started when you have not found the data you need in your internal wiki. And this is not even an exhaustive list. If the above actions did not give you enough information, then it is already worth escalating the question to the whole team or team / team leader. And, of course, do not forget to write down all the information you obtained in the wiki so that the other person does not waste time searching.

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