What to do before your process expert retires

Every company has one. Sometimes several.

The person who knows how the exception process really works. Who knows why that step exists, which customers are the awkward ones, what to do when the system says no and the answer is actually yes. They have been there nineteen years. They are unfailingly helpful. And in March, they are retiring.

Everyone knows this is a problem. Almost nobody does the right thing about it, because the obvious thing to do, book time with them and write it all down, does not work very well.

Why the handover meeting fails

Three reasons, and they are all predictable.

They cannot tell you what they know. Not because they are hiding it. Because after nineteen years it is not stored as facts, it is stored as reflexes. Ask them to describe the process and you get the clean version. The valuable knowledge only surfaces when a real case triggers it, and you cannot schedule that.

You do not know what to ask. The gaps you need to close are the ones you cannot see. If you knew which questions mattered, you would already have most of the answer.

What you write down goes stale immediately, and nobody trusts it. Six months later there is a document, and the first reaction to it is always: is this still right? Nobody can tell, because nothing in it says where it came from or when.

So the handover produces a document that is incomplete, unverifiable and quietly abandoned. Then in March, the person leaves.

Start from what they already wrote

Here is the thing that changes the odds.

Over nineteen years, that person wrote things down. Not everything, but far more than anyone remembers. Procedure documents. A training pack for the new starter in 2019. Annotated screenshots. Long emails explaining the awkward case. Notes in a system change request.

That material is the closest thing to their reflexes that exists outside their head. It is scattered and it is inconsistent, and that is fine.

Turn that into the first draft, and their remaining time changes job completely. They stop being the source. They become the reviewer. Instead of "tell us everything you know", which nobody can do, the question becomes "is this right?", which is a question anyone can answer quickly and accurately.

The order that works

1. Gather everything they have touched. Search by author. Search the shared drive, the wiki, the ticket system. Do not filter and do not tidy.
2. Get a draft record out of it: the steps, the things that move, the roles, the rules, the systems, with each item citing the document it came from.
3. Sit them in front of the draft. They will correct it fast, because reacting is easy and recalling is hard. Watch for what they add without being asked. That is the tacit knowledge, and it is the thing you could never have got by asking.
4. Capture the corrections as part of the record, not as a separate note somewhere.
5. Now book the workshop for the gaps that remain, and it is a short one.

What "good" looks like when they have gone

You will know this worked if, six months after they leave, someone new can answer a question without anyone saying "we used to ask Margaret".

Concretely, the record should let a new person:

• Follow one case end to end, and see what happens to it at each step.
• See their own role's work on its own, with the screenshots and checklists attached.
• Find the rule that constrains a step, and the document that states it.
• See what is confirmed by a human and what is only a draft.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A document that cannot tell you which parts are verified is a document people stop trusting the first time one part is wrong.

The uncomfortable part

This is not really a retirement problem. It is the same problem as onboarding taking six months, and four teams having four definitions of the same term, and the process map in SharePoint that was last accurate in 2019.

The organization knows things that the organization cannot find.

The retirement just puts a date on it.

How to get that first draft →

• How to document a business process (without a six-month workshop)

  The usual way puts forty people in a room and asks them to remember. There is a way that starts from what they already wrote down.

• What is enterprise process context?

  A definition, and the argument for why process, rather than data, is the thing everything else in an organization attaches to.