“Can we talk for a minute?” It’s Thursday afternoon. Ten minutes later the PM knows that the only person who understands the integration with the client’s system has handed in their notice and has three weeks left.
The first reflex is to look for a replacement. The second is to hide it from the client until the replacement is found. Both are understandable, and both eat the time there is least of.
For the first three days recruitment changes nothing. What can change things is what the PM does with the knowledge that will walk out of the company in three weeks.
Day one: what this person knows that nobody else does
I start with a conversation with the person who is leaving, on the same day. No reproach and no persuading them to stay. It is about one list.
I ask three things. What do you do in this project that nobody else does? What do you know that isn’t written down anywhere? Who on the client’s side calls you directly, and about what?
The answer to the third question is usually a surprise. It turns out the client’s administrator has been writing to this person outside the official channel for months, and half of the technical arrangements live in their private correspondence. It is the same hidden channel that shows up when you check who actually talks to the client.
Nothing has to be solved that day. It is enough that the list exists and that more than one person can see it.
Day two: who to tell, and what
News of someone leaving spreads on its own. The most a PM can decide is whether people hear it from them or in the corridor.
The team should hear first. Briefly: who is leaving, when their last day is, what we are doing over the next week. A team that finds out last starts wondering what else has been kept from it.
The sponsor gets the same message with one more thing: what this means for the date. If the PM doesn’t know yet, they say plainly that they will know on Monday.
The client is the hardest of the three conversations. In my experience a client takes a person leaving far better than discovering that nobody told them for two weeks. Three sentences are enough: who is leaving, who takes over the contact from tomorrow, when we will come back with the impact on the plan.
Day three: how much of that knowledge can still be captured
Three weeks’ notice looks like a lot. In practice the person leaving is at half speed after the first week, and in the last one they are returning equipment and saying goodbye.
Realistically about ten working days remain. It is worth dividing them on purpose.
Above all I stop giving that person new tasks. Every day spent delivering one more feature is a day in which the knowledge passed to nobody.
Instead, someone from the team sits next to them and for a few days they do together what the person used to do alone. A document written in solitude in the last week usually describes the obvious. Working in a pair brings out what the author no longer notices.
At the end, one three-way conversation with the client’s administrator. The new person takes over the contact alongside the old one, not after them.
What not to do in those three days
Don’t promise the client that nothing will change. It will, and the client will remember the promise longer than the departure itself.
Don’t rewrite the plan on day one. A plan changed in a panic will have to be changed again once it becomes clear what is really left to hand over.
Don’t quietly load the best person who stayed. That is the shortest road to a second resignation in three months.
What is left after 72 hours
After three days the PM should have four things: a list of what only one person knew, the name of whoever is taking it over, an honest note to the sponsor about the impact on the date, and a client who heard it from us.
There is no replacement yet. The project has, however, stopped depending on whether one turns up in time.
One question for this week
Who in your project is, today, the only person who can do or knows something? What would you do if tomorrow they asked for a minute of your time?
All situations described in this article are based on real events, but contain no company names, no individual names, and no data from any specific project.
