When one person holds it all

The only person who understands your CRM is leaving.

They built it, they have run it for years, and everything anyone knows about how it works is a question you ask them. You have two weeks. Code can be read. What a record means cannot. Nobody can open the database and work out that status 4 has meant renewal at risk since 2019 because one person decided it did.

Book a call Read the build versus buy argument

The advice you are about to get

Knowledge transfer is right for a tool and wrong for a record

Search this and you get the same five steps everywhere: run transfer sessions, have them write a runbook, shadow them for a fortnight. That advice works on tools, because a tool has an input, an output and a job you can describe in a paragraph.

What a record is worth is whether people believe it, and that belief sits in somebody's head, not in a document. A runbook can say how to restart the nightly sync. It cannot say that three fields stopped being kept up in 2022 and which system to believe when two disagree. A record that remembers on its own is the only kind that survives the person leaving.

What leaves with them

Four things that are not in the repository.

Flip it. The same four questions about the record, and where the answer lives.

Where the meaning lives

The record

Every question about it has the same answer, and the answer is a name.

Status 4Means what? Ask Dave.

Amount vs billingWhich one is right? Ask Dave.

The Monday fixWho runs it? Dave, from his laptop.

The Halcyon accountWhat is going on there? Dave was in every meeting.

The next person to ask gets the answer from the system.

Status 4Renewal at risk, since 2019. Set by a rule, and the rule is written beside the field.

Amount vs billingBilling wins. Written down once, before the argument.

The Monday fixA job the system runs and logs. Nobody's laptop.

The Halcyon accountFourteen meetings and three threads, read whole. Nobody had to write it up.

held in one head, for six yearsheld by the record, for anyone

Who holds it

Dave

Built it in 2019. Runs it alone. Notice handed in on Monday.

What the fields meanWhich system to believeThe jobs nobody wrote downEverything the record never had to hold

All four leave with him in fourteen days.

Anyone who asks

Dave can leave. The meaning stays, because the record built it from the work instead of from him.

The four things above did not need transferring. They needed a record that never had to keep them in a person.

The window

What a two week notice buys you

The assumption is printed under each line. Overrule any of them and the remainder recalculates.

The notice

Still owed on the day job

80 h
A two week notice, in working hours.
Ten working days at eight hours.
less 50
What they still owe on the job they were already doing.
The work in flight does not stop because somebody resigned.
less 10
Exit admin, the goodbye lunch, and the last afternoon.
The final day is not a working day in any company.
20 h
What is left for handover.
The optimistic reading. Against a system that takes about 256 hours a year to keep trustworthy, you are not short by a few days. You are short by an order of magnitude, so the hours are not for explaining the system. They are for getting the data out and proving it came out whole.

The order

Five moves, and the order is the point

01
Stop changing the fields today.
No new fields, no renames, no helpful tidying. A system that changes shape during a handover turns every note about it into a note about something else. The only move here with a deadline of today.
02
Get the rules out of their head, in writing.
Not how it is built. Which system to believe, which fields are dead, which accounts are exceptions and why. Ask about specific disagreements you have had; anybody can answer a question about a real case.
03
Export everything, including history, and open the file.
Every table, every relationship. Then have somebody who is not them load it and count the rows against the live system. An export nobody has opened is a file, not a backup.
04
Spend their last sessions verifying, never explaining.
Put the export in front of them and ask what is wrong with it. They will spot in ten minutes what a new engineer would not find in a month.
05
Move the record. Keep the tools.
The scripts, the dashboards, the integrations they wrote are yours and good. The record goes onto something that holds its own meaning, so the next person to ask what a field means gets an answer from the system, not from whoever has been here longest.

Where Kesey comes in

We do the extraction while you keep the business running

In a notice period the useful thing an outsider does is take the data and the questioning off your team, who are already absorbing the leaver's actual job. We sit in the sessions, ask the questions in the form people can answer, take the export and prove nothing is missing, and move the record onto something that holds its own meaning. The tools stay yours.

And if your build is fine and two people can run it, we will say so on the call. A second person who has run it for a full quarter without asking is a maintainer, not a dependency.

Fit

When this is you, and when to do nothing

This is you

One person built it and one person runs it. Every question about it has the same answer, and that answer is a name.
The notice is already in. The cheapest version of this conversation was a year ago. The second cheapest is this week.
Nobody else has ever opened the backup. If one person has ever restored it and that person is leaving, you do not have a backup, you have a hope.
The business runs on it. Invoicing, renewals or the board pack read from it. If it stopped today, you would know by Thursday.

Leave it alone

A second person has run it for a full quarter. Without asking them anything. That is a maintainer, not a dependency, and you have no key person risk to solve.
Somebody else has opened the export. Loaded it, counted it, and used it. The thing this page worries about has already been done.
It is small, boring and stable. A record that has not needed a structural change in two years and fits in one head can survive the change of head.
They are staying on properly. Not available for questions. Contracted, with hours, for long enough to matter. Then you have bought time and should use it on the move, not on documentation.

Questions

Frequently asked

The person who built our CRM is leaving. What do we do first?

Freeze the fields today, before anything else. No new ones, no renames, no tidying. Then spend the notice period getting the data out and checked rather than getting the system explained, because explaining it is the job you cannot finish in the time you have and getting the data out is the job you can.

Can we just document the system before they go?

Not usefully, and not because they are unwilling. Code can be read. What a record means cannot. Somebody new can open the repository and work out what the scripts do. Nobody can open the database and work out that one status code has meant renewal at risk for six years because one person decided it did. People also cannot list everything they know, so asking somebody to write up their system gets you a document about how it is built, which was never the part at risk.

How long does a CRM handover actually take?

A two week notice is 80 working hours. Roughly 50 go on the work they were already doing and 10 on exit admin and the last afternoon, which leaves about 20 hours, and that is the optimistic reading. The job you are handing over takes about 256 hours a year to do. You are not short by a few days, you are short by an order of magnitude, so plan against 20 hours and pick carefully what to spend them on.

Should we migrate during the notice period or after?

Start during, finish after. The move itself rarely fits in a notice period and does not need to. What has to happen while they are still there is getting the data out and checking nothing is missing, because those are the only two things that get harder the day they leave. A migration run three months later against an export you checked in week one is an ordinary project. The same migration against an export nobody opened is a dig.

What if they will stay on as a contractor?

Good, if it is real. Contracted hours for a set period is time you have genuinely bought, and the right thing to spend it on is the move rather than more documentation. Available for questions is not that. It fades within weeks, nothing forces it to happen, and it lets everybody put the decision off until the person has a new job and stops replying.

Is somebody leaving a reason to move off a homegrown CRM?

It is the moment the cost becomes visible rather than a new cost. The record was always going to have to be trusted by people who did not build it. A resignation is just the first time that happens with a date on it. Should you build your own CRM sets out the underlying argument: build the tools, never the record.

What if there is no export and no documentation at all?

Then the first twenty hours go entirely on getting a complete copy of every table with its relationships intact, and somebody other than the author opening it and counting the rows. Nothing else matters until that exists. It is also the only task here that is genuinely bounded: you know when it is finished, which is not true of anything else you could spend the fortnight on.

Twenty usable hours is not enough to explain a system, and plenty to get the record out whole.

If somebody has just resigned, the useful call is this week, not after their last day.

Book a call

The other thing a leaver takes with them: where a number came from.