Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Remedial system administration

More of a question than anything else, but..

I'm thinking about sitting down and writing a little paper on "remedial system administration" - basically, dealing with situations where a sysadmin comes into a site or shop and finds that the systems they're supposed to administer are going to require major work for whatever reason to bring them to a manageable state but without causing major user disruption. It's kind of an interesting little field which seems to have been written about very little in the past ...

So, can anyone point me to any prior work in the field? There are probably book chapters in the major system admin books, which I'll check when I get home, but I've been scratching my head for a while and can't think of a great deal of work on the subject.