What Happens When the Person Who Built the Solution Leaves
That one linchpin
Let me tell you a story about how someone improved a company’s workflow by 2-3x but when she left the company, they lost everything.
Her name is Sarah and she used to work for a client of mine, we’ll call them Super Fabricators or SuperFab for short.
(this is a made up name to obscure the actual company, so apologies if there’s an actual Super Fabricators company)
Sarah was the BIM lead for SuperFab and she had been working on most of their projects ensuring that SuperFab and their consultants were running smoothly. That information is flowing freely and everyone is up to date with their requirements on all the projects.
It was a lot of data to handle for Sarah. There were also so many programs to deal with, Revit, Revizto, Navisworks, not to mention the few dozen Excel spreadsheets of other random information. And that’s just for one project. Imagine handling that for 5 projects at the same time.
It was borderline overwhelming, so Sarah thought of a great idea.
She wants to build a BIM dashboard. Something that would collate all the information into an easy to use / view place. Something that would also get more people on board with BIM, it would give them a central place to view critical information without having to ask her all the time.
The problem was, juggling 5 projects is time consuming enough but Sarah knew this dashboard would be a game changer. So she spent her nights and weekends on it. Because she knew she needed a better way before she drowns in all that information.
So, with what little in-between time she has, she built the dashboard.
And thankfully she did because a game changer is actually what it was. Instead of manually looking through spreadsheets and models, she had a dashboard in PowerBI that collated all that information. She had one dashboard per project and it tripled her productivity. She no longer had to scrounge different programs for their data, she had it all at her fingertips.
It was so useful that the dashboard became the default way to run BIM on projects at SuperFab. Sarah even went on a “roadshow” to all the different offices presenting and training the dashboard that she made.
It was all going really well until six months later, Sarah resigned. She took up a job at another company to help build their BIM workflows.
SuperFab was left with a critical tool that no one knows how it works or how to set it up. Sure, Sarah did some handover workshops to others but no one really knew how it worked.
And Sarah was no developer. The BIM dashboard she built was cobbled together using what she knew. Some Excel sheets and a PowerBI dashboard somewhere. It also took a lot of manual effort to set it up for each project. But Sarah was always there to do it until now.
Soon, after Sarah left, the dashboard was retired. And SuperFab went back to drowning in BIM information and that 3x in efficiency was short lived.
When I was brought onboard, this was the 5th time someone came in with a brilliant idea, executed it and left. When they did, no one could pick up where they left off.
The Linchpin
But this isn’t Sarah’s fault. And it’s not really SuperFab’s fault either.
The dashboard was something Sarah built to make her own life easier. That’s actually how most good tools start. I mean we’ve all heard that Facebook started as a way to connect colleges.
But then other BIM leads started using it. Then, Sarah did a roadshow across offices, training people on it. Then, it became the default way to run BIM at SuperFab.
The minute the side project goes beyond a few people, that’s the moment the tool stopped being Sarah’s personal efficiency hack and became critical infrastructure for SuperFab’s operations.
Nobody wakes up and decides to build critical infrastructure with no documentation. It just... kinda happens. And if you don’t catch that moment, you end up exactly where SuperFab did.
A 3x efficiency gain that evaporates the moment one person leaves.
And Sarah doesn’t have the experience to build a system like that. Yes, she solved a very important problem. But scaling that to the entire company is a very different problem. You can’t retrofit proper infrastructure onto a side project after the person who built it is gone. Well, you can. But it will cost you a lot more.
Why companies can’t fix this
Sarah solved a real problem with the skills she had. She built something that genuinely worked and delivered massive value.
The problem is that building the thing is only half the job. The other half is making sure it can scale properly and survive without you. And that requires experience that Sarah simply didn’t have.
She’d never been the person who inherited someone else’s undocumented tool and had to keep it running. She doesn’t know what “built to last” actually looks like in practice because she’d never had to maintain a system that kept changing. She was just trying to do her job more efficiently.
(Yes, I speak from experience. I’ve been on both sides of this.)
Internal people are often genuinely talented. But talent isn’t the same as experience with the full lifecycle of a tool. Knowing how to build something that works today is different from knowing how to build something that still works in two years when you’re not there. It’s a kind of knowledge you only get from seeing these systems age and break.
Especially today. When it’s easier than ever to build your own tools with AI, how many “small” tools do you think are out there solving some problem? How many are brilliant ideas that people just don’t know how to scale? How many were abandoned because they weren’t designed properly in the first place.
So what should have happened?
When Sarah’s dashboard started going company-wide, SuperFab should have brought in more help. People that can help Sarah build a robust, company-wide solution, not push her dashboard to more teams.
Here’s what that could have looked like:
Sarah owns the requirements and domain knowledge (she knows what the dashboard needs to do)
Someone with experience building production systems helps architect it properly
They work together: Sarah’s BIM expertise + systems building expertise
The tool is built well and Sarah still gets credit, but it doesn’t die when she leaves
But this does mean SuperFab has to invest some money and effort upfront. And the way to do this properly is to commission a discovery session. Tell them “Sarah’s built this thing. It’s getting traction. Is this something we can keep running as-is, or does this need to be rebuilt as proper infrastructure?”
That conversation would have cost a fraction of what I eventually charged to rebuild it. Not to mention the productivity loss when Sarah left.
Back to Sarah
Sarah did great work. She should be proud of what she built.
SuperFab got real value from it. 3x efficiency is nothing to dismiss. And when I rebuilt it, I used a lot of her original logic because she understood the problem deeply.
The tragedy isn’t that Sarah left. It is that nobody recognized what they’d built until it was gone. When Sarah was doing that roadshow, showing other offices how to use the dashboard, someone should have said, “Wait. This is becoming an official process now. We should invest in making it stable and scalable.”
And I’ve seen this exact pattern play out dozens of times at different firms. Someone talented builds something valuable, it turns into a process dependent on them, they leave and it gets discontinued. The firm then goes back to the slow way of doing things.
Closing Thoughts
If you have someone building automation tools, especially if those tools are starting to get traction across teams, it’s worth considering if this a side project, or is this infrastructure?
And if it’s infrastructure, are we building it accordingly?
That’s what discovery is for. Not to replace your internal person or take credit for their work, but to make sure what they’re building can actually last beyond them.
If this sounds familiar, reach out.
Because the cost of recognizing this pattern late is always higher than the cost of catching it early.
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