Yup. But it's a goal to strive to. Nobody's proposing people spend their entire day documenting, but if they remember to document decisions/knowledge by default they mitigate the problem.
Besides, who said it's a good thing to have one person with 10 years of very specific, undocumented domain expertise? Sure, in rare cases it's some outlier guru. Sometimes you have PhDs who spent 10 years becoming domain experts and you can hardly expect them to be able to serialize it all into the company wiki. That happens. But I'd bet that in most cases these are just people who positioned themselves into a cozy role, guaranteeing you can never let them go. These are liabilities, not assets.
Comments
Yup. But it's a goal to strive to. Nobody's proposing people spend their entire day documenting, but if they remember to document decisions/knowledge by default they mitigate the problem. Besides, who said it's a good thing to have one person with 10 years of very specific, undocumented domain expertise? Sure, in rare cases it's some outlier guru. Sometimes you have PhDs who spent 10 years becoming domain experts and you can hardly expect them to be able to serialize it all into the company wiki. That happens. But I'd bet that in most cases these are just people who positioned themselves into a cozy role, guaranteeing you can never let them go. These are liabilities, not assets.