CASE STUDY

Complete IT takeover in 6 weeks, after the sole administrator left

The situation

For 8 years, a single person built and managed the company’s entire IT: servers, network, licenses, vendor relationships, passwords. He did it well - which is exactly why nobody ever asked what happens if he is gone. When he announced his resignation, the CEO discovered the reality most companies this size live in: the company did not own its own IT. An employee did.

There was no documentation. Access for license administration ran through his personal account, not a company one. Nobody else knew where the backups were, or whether they worked.

What we did

1. Emergency takeover (first 5 days): structured handover sessions with the departing employee, while he was still available. The priority: access, inventory, immediate risks. We recovered control of 7 administrator accounts and moved them to company-owned accounts.

2. Inventory and documentation (weeks 2-5): every system, license, contract, and procedure - written down, verified, tested. Along the way we discovered and fixed a backup that had gone unverified for 6 months.

3. Stabilization and handover: the company decided to hire a new person, whom we onboarded in 10 days using the documentation. Now any competent person can take over the systems in days, not years.

Results

Zero days of downtime during the transition - employees did not even notice the change
24 systems and procedures documented - from zero documentation to complete documentation in 6 weeks
The “one person knows everything” risk - eliminated structurally, not just moved onto another person

What this means for your company

Take the 10-second test: if your IT administrator resigned tomorrow, would you at least know where the admin passwords are? If the answer is “I don’t know”, you do not have a staffing problem - you have a business continuity risk, the same as not carrying insurance on your warehouse. The good news: this gets solved in a planned way, in a few weeks, without drama. The bad news: if you wait for the resignation, you solve it under pressure, and it costs more.

“I promised myself we would never again depend on a single person.”

— CEO

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