When your best service desk colleague hands in their notice — what actually walks out the door with them?
We've all seen it happen. There's that one person on the team who just knows things. Which workaround fixes the issue with client X. Why the system behaves oddly on Friday afternoons. What actually happened during that major incident two years ago that nobody documented.
They're not just good at their job. They are the institutional memory of your service desk.
And when they leave? That knowledge leaves too.
This is something we talk about a lot in the world of ITSM: knowledge drain. It's one of those problems that's easy to ignore until it bites you. Suddenly resolution times creep up. Escalations increase. New colleagues take months longer to get up to speed than they should. And nobody can quite put their finger on why because the reason retired along with the person who left.
The uncomfortable truth is that most service organisations are more dependent on individual knowledge than they realise. When knowledge lives in people's heads rather than in a system, you're always one resignation away from a gap.
The good news? This is a solvable problem.
Teams that invest in structured knowledge management capturing solutions as they happen, keeping articles up to date, making knowledge easy to find are far more resilient when people move on. New colleagues hit the ground running. First-line support resolves more without escalating. And the team's collective intelligence keeps growing, regardless of who comes and goes.
The biggest barrier we hear from service desk teams isn't willingness it's time. Writing a good knowledge item on top of your regular workload is hard. That's exactly the challenge we're working on making easier.
Curious how your team handles this? Do you have a knowledge management process in place or is a lot of your team's expertise still living in people's heads (or their inboxes)?
Would love to hear how others in the TOPdesk community are tackling this.