Steve is your rockstar. He built the core payment system, manages the legacy database. Perhaps he holds the entire compliance process in his head.
He’s brilliant. He’s indispensable.
And he’s a massive, uninsured business risk.
Because when Steve’s away – on holiday, off sick, or gone for good – teams stall. Reporting deadlines slip. No one knows what button to press.
Your 5-step triage plan
1. Find your “Steves”
You can’t fix what you haven’t mapped.
Gather your leads. Ask them:
“If this person left tomorrow, what would break?”
“What would we struggle to recover?”
Be honest. Make a shortlist of the top 3–5 single points of failure in your team.
2. Document the unwritten knowledge
Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for “someone else can pick this up if needed.”
Start with runbooks, not Slack threads. These should be simple, step-by-step guides:
“If X happens, do Y.”
Think: How to run end-of-month reconciliation when the main system throws an error.
Screen recordings are your best friend. A 5-minute video demo beats a 50-page wiki no one reads.
3. Cross-train, don’t just “backup”
A backup person who’s never touched the system is useless. Mandate that for every critical process, you have a “Primary” and a “Secondary” who is actively involved.
The Rule: The secondary must perform the task at least once a quarter.
4. Fix the access nightmare
If only one person has the admin password, you’re one “Exit” interview away from disaster.
Audit access controls for your crown jewels. Use a privileged access management (PAM) tool. Ensure at least two trusted people have secure, documented permissions.
Soundbite for your board: “We are one resignation away from being locked out of our own vault.”
5. Make handovers non-negotiable
Treat every holiday like a mini-handover. This forces documentation and cross-training in real-time.
This isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s a financial imperative.
How to sell this to the board
Frame it like this:
“We are currently carrying an unquantified, uninsured operational risk. This plan moves that risk from our people’s heads to a managed, resilient system. The ROI is continuity, audit-proofing and the ability to scale without fragility. The cost of inaction is a single point of failure that could halt our business.”
Your action plan before you leave this page
Schedule that meeting. Block 30 minutes with your leads. Title it: “Key Person Risk Triage”
Brainstorm your “Oh Crap” list. Identify the top 3-5 roles or people that keep you up at night
Pick ONE and assign an owner. Choose your biggest single point of failure and task someone with starting its first runbook
You’ve identified the vulnerability. Now, let’s architect the solution.
Completing that triage proves you’re serious. But what happens next? Manually documenting every process and building resilient data pipelines is a monumental task for an already stretched team.
Partner with us to systematically do the work your triage uncovers:
Document the tribal knowledge locked in your “Steves’” heads
Build the resilient, automated pipelines that prevent a single point of failure
Create that single source of truth you need, fast
Stop managing risk through heroics. Start building an architecture for resilience.
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