What If Joe Quits Tomorrow?

Any business I have had the pleasure to serve, always has one person, one employee, they cannot do without.  Joe knows the ins and outs of it all.  He knows how to crunch the numbers; he knows how the system works. Joe is the go-to guy. Without him, everyone is lost.  When Joe takes a vacation or is sick, everyone panics.  If Joe quits tomorrow and he is dedicated enough to do knowledge transfer, he will take years of experience with him that was facilitating the job and making it seem simple.  He cannot possibly do a knowledge transfer for many years of service over couple of weeks.  Why is this?  You would think that by now we would have learned to do things differently and not have a single point of failure.

We need to ask Joe, to take one day out of each week and document everything. First, Joe is going to list his regular tasks. 

Second, Joe will carefully document the steps. Now you might say, or even Joe might object that documentation is not his strongest suit.  Well then, ask another employee to shadow Joe for that particular task and write it all down in a step-by-step manner.  In a way that someone who just walked in through the door can actually follow. Something like a “Site Standing Order”.

Third, make this recorded data easily available to others in the team.  Create flow charts for the visual people.  Once in a while ask someone else to take care of one of the tasks instead of Joe.

This helps with one more thing other than just knowing how to do Joe’s job.  During these documentation sessions, we find surprising number of improvements that can improve our team’s efficacy, efficiency and turn around.

This process also allows us to be informed of all that is going on and eliminates the single point of failure.  Everyone becomes knowledgeable and the focus shifts towards process improvement as opposed to constant fire fighting.

We do not need extraordinary tools to carry out a task like this.  We just need a word processor and a database with good search functions to make the documentation available to all.  At the most, you might need to assign one person to act as a custodian or a gate-keeper to this database to ensure the database integrity, document updates and management.  Tallyho!