In an effort to help improve the range of tickets first level server support could handle, we made knowledge base article for everything and the manager was rather dogmatic about telling people to following the KB. If something went wrong, and someone deviated from the KB, they were in trouble.
Prior to this, most people on the team had some decent skills, and new people could grow as they encountered different issues, learned from others, and did some troubleshooting of their own… and some mistakes would inevitably be made along the way.
After a while, skills stopped developing, and even people who had skills seemed to regress. This seemed to hurt the team, and the potential for the people on it. Not good. It led me to question how we could have good documentation to get people up to speed quickly, without limiting them to never knowing more than the documentation told them. Maybe part of that was how the manager enforced this, creating a learned helplessness, but I don’t know for sure.
This all to say, that the intent was to help people handle more types of issues. Some people would learn one thing and were scared to do anything else, so those things sat around and wouldn’t get handled. We also had a lot of new hires and needed to be able to handle 80% of issues with relatively little training. Without the KBs, it could take a year or two of work for self-sufficiency with that 80% level, from what I’d seen. The goal wasn’t to dumb anyone down for control, even if that may have been the net result.
Unintended consequences are still consequences.
