A site manager resigns after nine years. She is conscientious and offers a full handover period.
She writes a thorough document. It covers the processes she thought of, which is not the same as everything she knows, because most of what she knows she stopped noticing years ago.
Four months after she leaves, the site is still discovering things. A supplier arrangement nobody understood, a customer with an informal agreement, a process everybody assumed was automatic that she had been doing manually every Friday.
The first failure: knowledge accumulates invisibly
Nobody sets out to become a single point of failure. It happens through years of answering questions, making small decisions and handling exceptions, none of which feels like knowledge at the time.
The second failure: the expert cannot list what they know
Asking somebody to document everything they know produces what they can currently think of, which is the visible fraction. The rest is only discovered by its absence.
The third failure: handover happens at the worst moment
During a notice period, alongside the normal job, while the person is mentally already leaving. This is the least productive possible time to attempt it.
The fourth failure: the successor does not know what to ask
They have not yet encountered the situations that would prompt the question, so the handover covers the process and misses the exceptions.
The fifth failure: the informal arrangements are invisible
A discount agreed verbally, a supplier who always does something, a customer with a particular expectation. These exist nowhere and surface as problems.
The sixth failure: customer facing answers go with them
The recurring questions customers ask are answered from memory, and a departure means new staff are inventing answers again, and a new starter six weeks later is giving a slightly different version again.
The seventh failure: the relationships are personal
Suppliers and customers who dealt with one person for years have to start again, and some of them do not.
The eighth failure: the workarounds are undocumented
Every long standing operation has processes that only work because somebody does something manually. These are invisible until they stop happening.
The ninth failure: it happens at every level
Not only managers. A long serving member of staff on a counter holds an enormous amount of local knowledge nobody has ever written down.
The tenth failure: the same gaps reappear with each new starter
New staff learn from whoever is there, imperfectly, and the errors propagate, and the drift compounds with every handover rather than correcting itself.
The eleventh failure: the help resources are not searchable
Where documentation does exist, people cannot find the answer in it, which is the ground in why your help centre search leaves people stuck.
The twelfth failure: nobody documents until somebody resigns
Which is the one moment at which it is too late to do it properly.
The fix: document continuously and take the answers out of heads
Recording the answer every time a recurring question is asked, into one maintained source, means a departure removes a person rather than a capability. An assistant answering from that source keeps every customer facing answer available regardless of who is working, and updating it as things change is the routine described in updating assistant for new service. A new site is where this discipline should start, as in launching a new location and the enquiries that follow. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under b2b.