Measuring It Without a Framework

You do not need a maturity model. You need to know whether this is getting better or worse, which three counts will tell you.

The principles in “Measuring It Without a Framework” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating the official explanation can use it to coordinate recurring work, identify tasks concentrated on one person and plan realistic backup capacity, while treating the data as a prompt for knowledge transfer rather than as a substitute for speaking with the people who do the work.

For an independent benchmark, compare the local approach with Ready.gov business preparedness guidance; the useful test is whether ownership, access and recovery remain proportionate and explainable when the usual expert is absent.

The three

Activities with exactly one capable person. From the map: count the rows where only one name appears.

Uninterrupted days off taken by your most depended-upon people. Not days booked: days where nobody contacted them.

Access held by one person. Accounts, systems, signatories where no second person can get in.

Three numbers, counted once or twice a year, on a piece of paper.

Why these

The first measures knowledge concentration directly.

The second is the honest test of whether the first has actually changed. A cross-training exercise that does not result in somebody taking a proper holiday did not work.

And the third is the cheapest category to fix, which makes it the one to watch for effort that is being avoided.

Reading the trend

Compare against last year, not against an ideal.

A single-person count falling from fourteen to eleven is real progress in a small organisation.

A count that has not moved in two years means nothing is actually being done, whatever was discussed.

The holiday number specifically

The most informative and the most resisted.

"He took two weeks" and "he took two weeks and nobody rang him" are different facts, and only the second one demonstrates anything.

Ask about contact rather than about leave. People will tell you honestly, because they remember the interruptions.

What not to measure

Documentation page counts, which measure writing rather than resilience.

Training hours, same.

Skills ratings on a matrix, which consume weeks and change nothing.

And anything that requires a tool, because the tool becomes the project and the project replaces the work.

Who should see the numbers

Whoever can act on them, which in a small organisation is one or two people.

Not a report. A conversation twice a year with the three counts written on a page.

When the numbers get worse

Normal, and usually caused by growth: new activities arrive with one person attached.

The question is whether the rate of new single-person activities exceeds the rate at which old ones are being spread.

If you are only ever adding, the map will keep getting worse regardless of individual effort.

What to check

Could you produce the three numbers today?

When did your most depended-upon person last go a week without being contacted?

How many accounts have exactly one person who can get in?

And has any of it changed since last year?

The point

Count uninterrupted days off, not days booked.

Took two weeks and took two weeks without being contacted are different facts, and only the second demonstrates anything.

Underlying all of this

Everything in this collection reduces to four habits: know where the dependence sits, do the cheap fixes first, use the absences that already happen as rehearsals, and decide deliberately about what remains. None of it requires a framework, a tool or a consultant, and an organisation that does those four things consistently is substantially harder to damage than one with a succession document nobody has read.

The recurring pattern

The recurring pattern across every section here is the same: dependence forms through sensible individual decisions, becomes invisible because it feels like reliability, and is addressed only after it has cost something. The work that prevents that is small, continuous and unglamorous, which is exactly why it gets deferred.