The step that only lives in one engineer's head

The scenario:

Every team has one. The step in the process that never made it into the wiki because the person who does it does it without thinking. It works right up until they are out sick, on leave, or gone for good. Then the ticket sits there because nobody else knows the trick to that one client's firewall. 

This is not a training problem. It is a documentation gap that only shows up at the worst moment. 

The prompt:

You are building a numbered SOP from a process that currently lives in one person's head. 

Context: [rough notes from fifteen minutes of that person talking through the process out loud, step by step, including the parts they'd normally skip because they're "obvious"] 

Build: 

  • A numbered, step-by-step SOP anyone on the team could follow cold 


  • A separate section for edge cases, the kind that only show up in that person's memory