Your operations person just resigned. What to do in the first two weeks.

The instinct after a resignation is to start recruiting immediately. That is the right instinct for the role and the wrong instinct for the fortnight, because the scarcest thing in the building is not a replacement. It is the notice period.

Whatever that person knows and has never written down is leaving on a known date. Everything else can wait.

Week one: find out what only they know

Do not ask them to write documentation. People are bad at describing their own work in the abstract, and the parts they skip are exactly the parts nobody else knows. Ask them to do the work while somebody watches and writes.

Pick the processes that would hurt most if they stalled. For most firms that is onboarding a new household, an annual review cycle, and anything involving money movement or a custodial form. Sit with them through a live case, end to end, and record every point where they made a decision without looking anything up. Those decisions are the undocumented process.

• Which systems they touch, and in what order
• Every login, permission, and administrative right in their name
• The exceptions: what they do when a form is rejected, when a custodian asks for something unusual, when a client wants something the standard path does not handle
• Who they chase, and what they chase them for
• Anything running on a schedule that nobody else sees

The handover document a leaver writes on their own is almost always a list of tasks. What you need is the list of judgements.

Week two: cut the single points of failure

Now go through what you captured and mark everything only they can do. Some of that is access, which is an afternoon of administration. Some of it is knowledge, which needs a second person to actually perform the task once before the leaver goes, not to read about it.

This is also the moment to check your access register, because a departure is the cleanest test of whether offboarding actually works at your firm. Every account should be named, and revoking it should take effect immediately. That is one of the controls we hold ourselves to, and it applies to staff as much as vendors.

Then decide what you are actually replacing

A resignation is the one moment a firm gets an honest look at what the role was. Most operations roles have grown by accretion rather than design, and the job description in the file bears little resemblance to the fortnight you have just documented.

Before you post the role, it is worth asking how much of what you wrote down needs a person at all. A meaningful share of most operations jobs is moving information between systems, which is work a machine does better and never resigns from. The question of whether to hire at all is worth its own conversation, and we wrote about it in hire an operations manager or outsource it.

The firms that come out of a departure stronger are the ones that used the notice period to convert one person’s memory into something the firm owns. The ones that just backfill tend to be having the same fortnight again in three years.