The work is written down, and then the writing is left behind

COOLORANGE SOLUTIONS LTD is an independent information technology consultancy working with small businesses across South Yorkshire from an office in Cudworth, Barnsley. Four kinds of engagement account for nearly everything the company is asked to do, and each one is named here by the document it leaves in the client's own hands.

The page below is laid out as eight chapters, because that is how an engagement actually reads: a walk round, a drawing, a plan, a window, a shelf of copies, a vocabulary, and a pack of paper at the end. The index beside these chapters moves with you, so the document can be entered anywhere.

The first hour on site

A review is not an inventory, and the difference matters: an inventory lists equipment, whereas a review explains what the business would lose if a given piece of it stopped. The order below is worked through in sequence, because each step narrows the next one, and the first hour settles most of it.

• First What the business does on an ordinary Tuesday: which files are opened, which system takes the orders, and which task nobody is able to do while the network is down.
• Second Where the data actually lives, meaning the physical or hosted location of every set of records the business depends on, including the sets that live on one laptop.
• Third Identity and access: who holds an account, which accounts still belong to people who have left, and whether administrative rights are shared between several people.
• Fourth The network path from a desk to that data, including the router, the switch, the wireless access points and the internet circuit, with the speed of that circuit measured and not assumed.
• Fifth Backup and restore, which are two separate things, because a backup is a copy that was made and a restore is a copy that was proved to open.
• Sixth Licensing and support contracts, so that renewal dates and the party responsible for each system are written in one place instead of four inboxes.

Nearly every unreviewed network contains one switch that nobody present is able to account for, and it is usually the one carrying the accounts machine.

Where the rollback is written down

A migration is the move of a system from where it runs now to where it will run next, and the planning decides whether the move is dull. The plan names every move in order, the person who performs it, the check that confirms it worked, and the point at which the old arrangement is taken out of service.

The rehearsal comes before the cutover. A rehearsal copies the data into the new system while the old one keeps running, which means the copy time is measured on the real circuit and the awkward files are found a fortnight early rather than at midnight. The cutover is the short window in which the business stops using one system and starts using the other, and it is agreed in hours, because that number governs every other number in the plan.

The rollback position is the state the old system must be left in so that abandoning the move takes minutes, and it is written down before the cutover begins, together with the condition that would trigger it. In practice a written rollback is almost never used, which is the argument for writing it, since the version held only in somebody's head is the version that fails at two in the morning.

Engagements are shaped around that structure and not around a fixed package. Some clients want the review and the plan, and will move the system themselves; others want the move performed and the notes handed over afterwards.

Nothing in the plan sits on a week grid, because a small business moves in the evenings and on the two Saturdays when the yard is quiet.

What is left with you

An engagement closes when the following four artefacts exist, are readable by somebody who was not present while the work was done, and are held by the client rather than by the consultancy.

• The network map. The right-hand drawing from chapter 02, produced for the client's own site: every device named, every address recorded and every link drawn as it physically runs.
• The location of the credential register. The register itself stays under the client's control; the notes state where it is, who holds it and which accounts it needs to contain.
• The backup schedule. What is copied, how often, where each copy is kept, and how many copies are retained before the oldest is overwritten.
• The restore-test notes. The date of the test, the file that was opened, how long the restore took, and what the outcome was.

Those four documents are the point of the work. A client who holds them is able to instruct any competent engineer, including one who is not this company, which is a reasonable definition of a handover.

A first e-mail to helpdesk@coolorangesolutions.digital is most useful when it says what the business does, roughly how many people sit at desks, and which single thing is currently causing the trouble. That is enough to say whether a review is the right first step or whether the answer is shorter than one.