The one coworker who knows everything
Every company between 20 and 200 people has him. The one admin, the one sales colleague with a knack for the system, the only person who knows how the CRM really works. Why the field is named what it’s named. Which automation you must never touch. Where the bodies are buried in the process. Management considers him an asset. He’s a concentration risk with flex time.
The scene always plays out the same way. The coworker resigns, two weeks of handover, a few passwords get written down, everyone is optimistic. Three months later, lead assignment breaks. New inquiries land nowhere, sales only notices when a prospect calls to ask why nobody has reached out in ten days. Now somebody digs through the system for the cause and finds a flow named Test_Final_v2_DO_NOT_DELETE, triggered by a workflow from 2021, which in turn checks a field that hasn’t been populated since the last form relaunch. No description, no comment, no document. The person who could explain it now works somewhere else.
That’s not bad luck. That’s the predictable consequence of knowledge living in a head instead of in the system.
Documentation, naming conventions, metadata hygiene: sounds like bureaucracy, like the stuff you do when nothing important is going on. In reality it’s insurance, and cheap insurance at that. A flow named Lead_Routing_Region_DACH with a description covering purpose, trigger, and point of contact costs two extra minutes at creation. A flow named Test_Final_v2 costs two weeks of forensics three years later, plus the deals that leaked away in the meantime. Run that math.
The bus factor, meaning the question of how many people would have to be hit by a bus before nobody understands the system anymore, sits at exactly one in most orgs we audit. Sometimes at zero, when the coworker is already gone and the company is running on a system nobody understands but that still works. For now.
An audit exposes this mercilessly, by the way, because you only have to ask the question once: explain to me what this flow does. If the answer starts with “Markus built that back in the day,” you know enough.
How many of your automations could someone else explain tomorrow? Count honestly. That number is your real maintenance contract.
