I have watched this happen more times than I can count.
A company implements a new system.
It goes well.
The people who built it know exactly why everything works the way it does.
Then one of them leaves.
They train their replacement.
Good training, probably.
But they have two weeks, they’re wrapping up their own work, and nobody transfers one hundred percent of what they know.
Call it seventy percent.
A few years later, that replacement leaves.
They train the next person.
Seventy percent of seventy percent.
Do that a few times and eventually nobody in the building knows why anything is configured the way it is.
At which point someone builds a spreadsheet.
Then another.
Then someone says:
“The system can’t do that.”
Except sometimes it can.
It has always been able to do that.
Nobody left remembers how.
Eventually someone says:
“This system is terrible. We should replace it.”
The software did not wake up one morning and forget how it worked.
The people did.
Which is why I’ve become much more interested in how companies preserve system knowledge than how many features a product has.
Features survive employee turnover.
Understanding tends to leave through the parking lot.
Jim Rosenberg
President & CEO, NEO3
The Workaround — because every system has them.
