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OperationsDelivery · 5 min read
The bus factor and how to lower it
If one person being unavailable would halt a critical process, you don’t have a team strength. You have a single point of failure.
The bus factor is the morbid but useful question: how many people would have to be unavailable before a critical thing stops working? When the answer is one, you have a fragile operation, however well it runs day to day.
Heroes are a liability
Every organization has the person who 'just knows' how the critical thing works. It feels like a strength. It’s actually a risk: that knowledge is undocumented, unshared, and one resignation or vacation away from a crisis. Reliance on heroes is fragility wearing a cape.
Spread the knowledge
- Document the critical processes so they don’t live in one head.
- Cross-train so more than one person can run each key thing.
- Build systems that encode the knowledge instead of requiring it.
- Notice where you’re relying on a hero and treat it as a bug to fix.
If one person’s absence can halt the operation, that person isn’t your strength. They’re your single point of failure.