Knowledge That Walked Out the Door
A 250-person medical device manufacturer lost three senior design engineers in one quarter. Each had 12-18 years of tenure. Exit interviews revealed that critical design rationale for two flagship products existed only in those engineers' heads and personal notebooks. A junior engineer discovered that a manufacturing change made two years earlier had been approved verbally and never documented, and the team could not reconstruct why a particular tolerance was chosen. Regulatory audit is scheduled in nine months, and the firm must demonstrate design history file completeness. The VP of R&D wants to hire a knowledge-management consultant and deploy an enterprise wiki.
1. Assess whether an enterprise wiki is an adequate response to this situation.
Read the worked answer
A wiki is a repository, and the problem is not a missing repository. The design rationale was never captured because the process did not require it at the moment of decision. A wiki deployed after the fact invites people to reconstruct rationale from memory, which produces plausible but unverifiable narratives, worse than nothing for a regulatory audit.
The real gaps:
- Capture at decision time. The tolerance change was approved verbally; no gate required a written rationale.
- Single-point dependency. Knowledge lived in individuals with no redundancy.
- Audit traceability. The design history file cannot be reconstructed retrospectively with confidence.
A wiki may be a useful store, but without a process change it becomes an empty shell. The response should be process-first, tool-second.
2. Recommend the interventions that address both the immediate audit risk and the underlying knowledge loss.
Read the worked answer
Immediate (audit, 9 months): Conduct structured elicitation interviews with the departing engineers (and any still reachable) to reconstruct rationale for the two flagship products, clearly labeled as retrospective reconstruction with confidence levels. Pair each with documentary evidence where it exists. Identify the tolerance decision and document what can be verified vs. inferred; flag inferred items for the audit team proactively.
Structural:
- Add a design-review gate requiring written rationale for any change affecting form, fit, or function, with a named approver. Verbal approvals become non-compliant.
- Introduce redundancy for critical knowledge: no single owner for any design element; require a secondary reviewer sign-off.
- Capture rationale at the moment of decision, not at exit.
Cultural: Reward documentation in performance reviews; otherwise engineers treat it as overhead. The wiki, if used, is the store, not the solution.