What happens when the person who set it up leaves
In a small company one person usually builds the automations. The risk is not that they leave. It is that nobody wrote down what they knew.
In most Swiss SMEs that have automated anything, one person did it. They know which tool connects to which system, why a step was added in March, and what to check when the output looks wrong.
None of that is written anywhere, and it does not need to be until the week it very much does.
What actually gets lost
Not the automation itself, which keeps running. What is lost is the ability to change or repair it.
The successor inherits something that works, has no idea why it was built that way, and is therefore afraid to touch it. In our experience that produces one of two outcomes: the automation is frozen and slowly drifts out of usefulness, or it is switched off at the first problem and the manual process returns permanently.
The handover note, which takes forty minutes
Not documentation. Five things, per automation, in plain language.
What it does, in one sentence. What it connects to. Where the login lives. What to check when the output looks wrong. And the one decision that would otherwise look arbitrary — the « we do it this way because » sentence.
That last item is the valuable one and the one that never survives in anybody’s head but the builder’s.
When to write it
Now, while the person is still there and in a good mood. A handover note written during a notice period is worse in every respect and is written by somebody whose attention has already moved on.
The related exposure from last month
The 22 October post asked which automations have no remembered manual route. This is the same list from a different angle: the ones where only one person knows how they work.
If an automation appears on both lists, it is your single largest operational risk in this area, and it will take one afternoon to move it off both.