My main project manager quit on a Tuesday with 3 active client projects in the middle.

I had to personally take over all their Slack channels and Asana boards for a month while scrambling to hire a replacement, which basically meant I did two full jobs at once and barely slept. Has anyone else had a key person bail without notice and how did you handle the handoff without everything falling apart?

3 comments

3 Comments

keith_henderson8d ago

Honestly that sounds like a management failure to have one person holding three active projects without any backup plan. A good company builds systems that don't collapse when a single person leaves. Taking over their Slack and Asana directly just proves there was no real process in place. The scramble and lost sleep are the cost of not planning for people to move on, which they always do. Maybe the real lesson is to cross-train staff so the whole operation isn't a house of cards.

noahw538d ago

Yeah that's a really good point. Used to think you just had to trust your team leads with their own stuff, but seeing a project fall apart after one person quit last year changed my mind. Now we make sure at least two people know the basics of every major client account.

shane_anderson8d ago

Our team learned the hard way after losing our lead designer. We had to pull two all-nighters just to find the client logos, which is exactly why @noahw53's backup plan makes sense. Now I'm basically forced to share my passwords.