Last month on the LStech list a member posted a question asking about how she should handle the transition from one IT consultant to another, and it struck me that so many programs use IT consultants for some level of support that it must be a common problem.

I didn’t find much in the way of guidance about dealing with tech consultant transitions on the ‘net (I’m still looking), but list members William Guyton, Michael Bowen and Donald Carder offered the following suggestions:

• Arrange a formal meeting to transfer the reins: Arrange a time for your new tech support team to meet with the old team to transfer relevant knowledge.
  
  
• Get a contact for future problems: Make certain that you have a point of contact with the old team for unanticipated issues that may come up in the future (such as domain, DNS, contracts, and firewall, router and switch configurations).
  
  
• Require Documentation: If your consultants have constructed a network for your program - or even managed a network - make it a requirement that they provide clear documentation that includes:
  
  
  • Physical and logical network diagrams
  • IP address space maps, including NATs
  • Directory structures that identify where important things are on the network
  • Copies of zone files for your domain (if applicable)
  • Vendor list (that includes hardware and software vendors) with contact names and phone numbers, 
  • Passwords (especially the administrator ones that will need to be changed), and
  • License numbers for various software and SSL certificates (for your web site or remote mail server) as well as information about who he registered contact was for those licenses. 
    

There are also a few applications which might be useful to help generate and manage documentation.  

• To be ahead of the game on keeping documentation about your network, use a wiki to keep track of tech policy, procedures and general documentation
• Network monitors like Nagios and Spiceworks (the latter reviewed on LSNTAP, here) can generate automatic inventories and address mappings
• Consider GLPI, a web-based open source database, for ongoing inventory management and license tracking   
  

Has your organization made the transition from one IT consultant team to another?  What was your debriefing process?  Do you have other suggestions?

Update pulled from the LStech list, 5/26/09: A helpful thread about documenting networks from Slashdot.