Where does losing one person put the business at risk?

Experienced people accumulate knowledge about equipment, processes, customers, failure modes, and operating conditions that is rarely captured completely in procedures or databases. When those people leave, change roles, or simply are not present when a problem occurs, performance can change in ways that are difficult to quantify.

The missing variable may not be headcount. It may be knowledge the organization never realized it depended on.

Troubleshooting time, decision quality, consistency, yield, downtime, and other outcomes can depend on expertise that exists only in the way particular people recognize and respond to conditions in the system.

This Hard Case follows a workforce capability problem through ruwbi's six-step method to determine what knowledge was affecting the operation and where its absence changed the outcome.