Every company has one. The person who knows which supplier gives the best price, which login opens the customs portal, and why the monthly report is built the way it is. When they take annual leave, work slows. When they resign, it stops. The fix is not a big system, it is a habit: writing things down in one agreed place, in plain language.
Do not try to document everything. Start with the work that hurts when it stalls:
A document on one laptop is not documentation, it is a risk. Keep it in a shared drive or a simple wiki the team can open from any device. Name the folders the way people actually speak: Finance, Operations, Suppliers, HR. One page per process, with a clear title at the top.
Plain text beats clever formatting. If a page needs a training session to be understood, it will not be read.
Documentation dies quietly. Two small rules prevent that. Every page gets an owner, a person's name rather than a department, plus a review date. And whoever finishes a task writes ten minutes into the page while it is still fresh. Ten minutes after the task is worth an hour a month later.
Q8DM sees this on internal system projects often: the new software works, but nobody wrote down how the old process ran, so the new system copies the same confusion.
The real test is a two-week holiday, not a resignation. Before the next leave, have the person hand over in writing, not verbally. Sit with them, follow the steps exactly as written, and fix what is missing. If someone else can cover the work for two weeks from the documents alone, you have something real.
For a resignation, add one more step: a short exit session where account ownership transfers in writing. New owner named on each account, passwords rotated, vendor contacts introduced by email.
Start with one process this week, the one that stops when a single person is away. Write it in seven steps, put it on the shared drive, and give it an owner. If you want help setting up the structure or training your team to keep it going, talk to q8dm.com.