In talking with a customer recently, I was able to pick up an interesting use case for Monolith’s Knowledgebase.  One of our industrious clients came up with a new and unique idea for leveraging our out-of-the-box wiki-based knowledgebase – shift hand-offs.

A little background may be needed to help explain the concept.  Around the clock NOCs (Network Operation Centers) have multiple shifts in order to staff the full 24 hour time period.  When shift changes occur, there is an opportunity for critical issues or information to be lost or a ball to be dropped.  Shift hand-off procedures are used to pass tactical information from one shift to the next.   This information is not something that can be put in tickets (even though ticket numbers are usually associated with them).  Good hand-off procedures lay out the issues that the new shift needs to be aware of in order to stay out of hot water.

Using Monolith’s knowledgebase, NOCs can create an individual wiki article for each shift.  The content of the wiki article provides a ‘hot list’ of information to keep track of.  The nice thing about the Knowledgebase is that entries can be updated on the fly (like a shift journal).  The knowledgebase is version controlled and user-tracked, so nothing can be lost.   Shift hand-off is incredibly easy and nobody has to worry about someone else’s bad handwriting, or overlooking something critical.

An added bonus of this tactic is that it is completely searchable, so the information can be leveraged in the future.    For example, if a random occurrence happens not so randomly, then you can search through the shift journals and have trending/historical data.   This tactic has yielded nice results for at least one Monolith customer.  I thought a blog would be a nice way of informing our current customers as well as potential ones of this great idea.

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Monolith Software, Wiki Knowledgebase, NOC, Shift Hand-off, event trending, shift journal