Let's say a large enterprise opens a new office in (insert random location here) and want the new colleagues up to speed as fast as possible. Let's also say this enterprise is a very typical one with a complex environment, lots of history and almost full lack of documentation.
What's already been decided is that the new colleagues will receive howto-style documentation for the most typical tasks and will get seme architecture documentation for some of the more complicated systems.
Any ideas about improving this process? And more specifically, what should such a howto document look like to be helpful?
I would spend the time you have writing a document that gives a good overview of the big picture with all the major components for whatever their area is. Then they can use it as a reference, and an overview of what they may need to learn. So for example, if you have big cluster setups draw pictures of those. If they are network admins at least put together a decent diagram of the company's network.
From there, I would start documenting anything that is unusual about the environment, followed by anything that is particularly advanced or complicated.
If these are lower level positions where they will be doing mostly repetitive tasks then the howtos make sense to me, but if they are more advanced positions then the big picture combined with the unusal/complex documentation I described makes the most sense.
I set up a wiki at our office to capture snippets of knowledge as the devs had time to write stuff. The boss was only willing to allow "full and complete documents" so he wanted sharepoint instead. Since no dev had time to do "dull and complete docs" there were none written, and as the PHB banned the wiki, we're back to where we were a couple years ago.
If the systems are properly documented no extra steps are required. Any sysadmin worth the name should be able to determine what needs to be done and how it s to be done based on the system documentation, although a run-through by an experience staff member will of course make things even simpler for them.
When a system is properly documented the entire IT staff could be run over by that proverbial bus and new staff should be able to get up to speed very quickly without assistance. If that's not the case in your organisation it needs urgent rectification.
Start by creating an internal wiki and use that base as a place to document. I have been doing that at my work for some time now and the information there just gradualy appears as its needed.