Recommended reading for IT SA PM helpers
I'm brainstorming this morning to put together a recommended reading collection for a potential student helper with an engineering background who may start working with me on information technology project management and system administration documentation tasks.

(Oh, and I joined twitter.com last night -- username naturedance.)

SAGE's short topic book 11: Documentation Writing for System Administrators. Very important.

The internal documents I've authored recently about our wiki rollout: wiki usage guidelines and basics of the markup language, and the project management methodology and templates I've designed.

The getting started user manual for our wiki software.

Also, this blog post about meeting styles: http://lopsa.org/node/122

SAGE's short topic book 7: System and Network Administration for Higher Availability. Read and think about the ways we'll be documenting the business processes necessary to achieve reliability, high availability, disaster recovery, and/or business continuity.

Speaking of which... it'll be useful for them to gain familiarity with the following terms:
business continuity
disaster recovery
high availability
fault tolerance
replication
redundancy
and to a lesser degree, information assurance

I'm skimming The Theory and Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition, putting together a list of recommended chapters, and the following sentence leaped out at me:

"A service is not complete and cannot properly be called a service unless it is being monitored for availability, problems, and performance, and capacity-planning mechanisms are in place."

So, so, so very true.

(Which reminds me, I want to gain more knowledge myself about the Incident Command System method for thinking about IT wildfires. Perhaps there's a book I should read, or an online class I could take... but that's a sidetrack and I need to finish this reading list now.)

Hmm. Chapter 5 about Services. Definitely recommended for someone helping me document our services!

Chapter 6, but only the first introductory paragraphs, and then section 6.3 about dream data centers, and section 6.4 conclusion.

All of chapter 9, about documentation.

All of chapter 10, about disaster recovery and data integrity.

All of chapter 14, about customer care.

All of chapter 17, about change management.

All of chapter 18, about server upgrades.

All of chapter 19, about service conversions.

All of chapter 20, about maintenance windows. We're trying to encourage the "flight director" technique among some of our groups.

All of chapter 31, about perception and visibility.

All of chapter 32, about being happy.

All of appendix A, about the roles of system administrators... think ahead of time about constructive ways to collaborate with system administrators of different types.

I should probably recommend Time Management For System Administrators, too, since we're trying to encourage those sorts of work methods and awarenesses in our technical staff.