[Themaintainers] Succession Planning for legacy maintainer?

[Caroline Kyungae Smith]

Hi lovely list serv! I hope this finds everyone well and staying safe.

I have a random question I wanted to throw out to the group to see if
anyone had any advice.

*TL;DR: has anyone had to map the workflows of a legacy system maintainer
before?* What did you do and how did you manage a subject matter expert who
knows so much but can't communicate it in a straightforward way? What was
the final format of the documentation?

--

I am currently on a project where there is an 80-year-old subject matter
expert and keeper of knowledge of an old mainframe that we are currently
working to modernize, by converting the COBOL to Java and moving it to the
cloud.

Of course, this system is so old, documentation is either lacking, or in
disparate places, or out of date. This SME is a walking A.I. analysis of
business processes and has been doing them manually for years. It's rather
difficult to pull information out of him because he is so knowledgeable.
His processes and the business acronyms and business logic are like second
nature to him -- automatic and difficult for him to enunciate.

I essentially want to capture his knowledge around how he knows something
is wrong and what he does to solve it, so I can then ask why X is being
done and if it needs to continue as is.

I haven't worked on creating a Succession Plan before, and feel like I will
need to leverage my usual design research frameworks and methodologies to
pull information out of him and map/document it in a consumable way.

My ask: has anyone had to map the workflows of a legacy system maintainer
before? What did you do and how did you manage someone who knows so much
but can't communicate it in a straightforward way?

-- 


[image: --]
Caroline Smith
[image: http://]carolinekyungaesmith.com
<http://www.carolinekyungaesmith.com>
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