What happens to project knowledge when someone leaves?
If it was in their inbox, it goes with them — and it does not fade gradually, it disappears on the date IT applies the mailbox policy. Correspondence addressed to the project survives resignation. Correspondence addressed to a person does not.
The mechanism is brutally simple
The project engineer resigns. HR runs its process. Ninety days later, IT deactivates the mailbox — on a policy that is entirely reasonable, was approved by somebody sensible, and was never discussed with anyone on the project.
And three years of instructions, agreements, clarifications and understandings go with it. Not degraded. Gone, on a date, in a way nobody will notice until somebody goes looking for a document that used to exist.
Why nobody catches it
Because the absence of a document is invisible. A missing drawing is obvious — there is a gap in a numbered set. A missing email is nothing at all: no gap, no hole, no error message. It simply was never there, as far as anyone who was not on the original thread can tell.
Estimates put a substantial share of institutional knowledge in individual hands and nowhere else. Those figures circulate loosely and I would not lean hard on the decimal — but the mechanism is not in dispute, and anyone who has taken over a workstream from a departing colleague has felt it directly.
The fix is a filing decision, not a technology one
Address project correspondence to the PROJECT. Register it. Then the record belongs to the project and survives resignation, reorganisation, retirement and the ninety-day policy — because it was never in a mailbox to begin with.
And the same doctrine covers tasks: reassignment with a trail, so nothing dies with its owner. The test for both is identical, and it is uncomfortable. If a key person resigned tomorrow, would anybody know what they were carrying, or where the record was?
References
- Workplace knowledge-management research — the share of institutional knowledge held only by individuals. Attributed loosely; the figure circulates via secondary sources.
Zepth is the construction project delivery platform — it runs construction, procurement and asset management on one record, and does the work: reading the drawings, reviewing the submittals, matching the invoices and flagging the risks, with a human sign-off on anything consequential.
Related questions
See Zepth on your project.
A short, tailored walkthrough on your real workflow — no generic demo.
Book a meeting