Published: 2025-09-30

Notes for IT Engineering Teams

Teams do better when information is easy to find, share, and update. Too often, knowledge gets scattered across emails, chat threads, personal notes - or worse, it never gets written down at all. To address this, I created a OneNote template that serves as a single, organized knowledge base for the team.

This template balances technical documentation, meeting notes, troubleshooting guides, and upgrade processes, all within a structure that is intuitive and easy to maintain. The template is intended to be filled in PER technology, meaning that each technology the team manages should have its own dedicated copy.

Why Notes Matter

Notes are the backbone of an efficient engineering team. Good documentation enables each member to focus on their area of expertise without needing to be involved in every project at once, while still staying aligned with the rest of the team. Members act as Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in different technologies, ensuring deep knowledge in key areas, yet maintaining enough shared understanding that anyone on the team can step in, contribute, or take over when needed.

Well-written notes make it possible to:

• Share knowledge quickly and clearly
• Avoid re-learning the same lessons individually
• Speed up problem-solving and onboarding
• Allow each team member to work more independently
• Enable the team to handle a larger workload at once
• Provide a living runbook for troubleshooting and upgrades

Three Simple Concepts for Better Notes

1. Capture What Others Need

• Ask: “What steps would another engineer need to follow to get the same result?, “How would I explain this so a new teammate could do it on their own?” or "What might the team need to remember in the future?"
• Include both overview (awareness, context, background) and details (step-by-step).
• Don’t forget screenshots where helpful.

2. Organize the Hierarchy

• Think table of contents: what will the structure look like once you’re finished?
• Start messy if needed, then come back later to reorganize.
• Keep a logical flow so notes can actually be followed.

3. Keep It Updated

• If you learn something new or something changes, update.
• Use the date under the page title to keep track of the latest version.

Sample Notes Page

• (2). The table of contents comes later after you've written the raw notes.
• (1). These are the raw notes: the Overview (1B) comes after the details (1A) as they are jotted down while you work.
• (3). Go back and update things as needed.

Imagine jotting down notes while making coffee so you can later share the recipe with a friend. As you go, you record each step of the process. Once you’re finished, you might reorder your notes to make them clearer. At the end, you could write a brief overview of the process and, once everything is organized, add a table of contents to make it easy to follow, especially if the notes are quite long. Building the table of contents might help you realize you need to move things around or fill in some information.

The OneNote Template

How to Use It

Create a OneNote section using the structure below and name it something like tmplNewTech. Copy this section each time you onboard a new technology, or once for each technology your team already maintains.

• Encourage consistency: everyone places notes in the right section.
• Use subpages for specifics: each incident, upgrade, or meeting gets its own page.
• Archive regularly: move old content to keep the main sections tidy.

Example

Structure Here’s the high-level layout of the OneNote template, with a description of how each section should be used: Alerts Does this technology need alerting configured? How are the alerts received? (email, SIEM, dashboard, SMS, etc.) How often do they need to be created or reviewed? What levels of alerts do we need? Emergency - critical issues requiring immediate attention. Action - issues that require follow-up but are not urgent. Aware - informational alerts to maintain visibility. Architecture Drawing showing how the technology fits in with others. These do not have to be formal, enterprise-approved diagrams. The purpose is to help the team and new team members learn, and to serve as a reference for discussions. Certificates Does this technology use any certificates? How are they obtained and installed/implemented? Expiration management - how do we get alerted or know when a certificate is nearing expiration? Licensing Capture all licensing information. Keys, renewal dates, vendor instructions. Logging How is logging performed? What information needs to be captured? Does the logging information need to be sent somewhere? (e.g., SIEM, centralized log store, monitoring platform) Meetings Meetings worth keeping and sharing with team members. Use subpages like 202X-04-XX for dated notes. Owner Who owns the technology and who uses it. Great for clarifying responsibility. Recurring Requests / Tasks Good for new people. Step-by-step how-tos for daily/weekly requests. Reporting What needs to be reported on this technology? How does the reporting get implemented? (dashboards, scheduled reports, automated exports, etc.) Scenarios These are mini projects you work on for that technology. Examples: making a change, enabling a new feature, testing a configuration, or rolling out a small initiative. Great for documenting the steps so they can be reused or referenced in the future. Tech Notes (tn) This is where we keep the “how-to” documentation for using that technology. If the technology is large and has multiple sections or modules, break them out into separate groups: tn – Module Name 01 tn – Module Name 02 Each header page organizes its module, and subpages under it hold the details. Training Capture training materials, summaries, and lessons learned. Notes that will benefit teammates in the future. Troubleshooting / Incidents Anytime something happens, record it here. Excellent for building a learning archive for the whole team. Upgrades Log of upgrades to the technology. Include dates, versions, steps taken, and lessons learned. Vendor Info Vendor contact information and links to official documentation. Useful for support cases and escalation. z-Archives.old Place any old pages here to keep the main notebook clean. Keeps a history without clutter.