Knowledge risk brief

Summary

Where this company's knowledge rests on too few people. Each figure below jumps to the detail behind it.

Concentrated subjects (all 25)

Where an expert is marked not lately, they know the subject but have stopped working on it. That is a sharper finding than concentration alone: measured against a real project, a lead who had already stopped was less than half as likely to still hold the subject six months on.

A subject is concentrated when most of its expertise sits with one or two people. Bus factor is how few people together hold the majority of it, so a bus factor of one means a single departure takes the topic with it.

Who is exposed (11)

The same finding read by person rather than by topic. Sole knowledge has no cover behind it at all. Led knowledge has others contributing, so it degrades rather than disappears.

Where a nearest candidate is named, that is a statement about the record and not about ability: of everyone indexed, this person starts closest to the work. Where nobody is named, nobody in the record stands out, which is the sharper finding of the two.

One-person connections (8)

Subjects that only one person has ever done work across. They have their own experts, so nothing that counts experts per subject shows this: what rests on one person is not any of the subjects but the knowledge that they belong together, and whoever picks one up afterwards has no reason to look at the others. Where the crossings join up they are listed as the one body of work they are, since that is what would leave.

Joined work (1)

Subjects that get worked on together, where the same person leads every one of them. This is a heavier finding than a concentrated subject on its own: whoever takes the work over has to learn the whole of it at once, and a list of subjects one at a time never shows that.

How this was measured

Every figure here is arithmetic over the indexed graph, with no model involved and no judgement applied. A person's share of a topic is their weight in it against everyone else's. Bus factor counts the fewest people whose combined share passes a majority. A topic is critical when one person holds most of it, and elevated when two do.

The finding only sees what was indexed, which here was codeowners, confluence, git, github, jira, org-csv, pagerduty, slack. Knowledge that lives somewhere whodar was not pointed at does not appear, so this is a floor on concentration rather than a complete picture.