Audit

A) Corporations are immortal, but human beings are not. Human beings take vacations, get sick, quit, and die. When the body of knowledge stored in a key persons head is not available, the company must start from scratch. The documentation for any particular task should be detailed enough so that a qualified person can take over and accomplish the task with minimum training and supervision when the person who normally does it is not available. B) When several people are performing the same task without documentation, the chances of any two of them doing it exactly the same way is close to zero. Remember the party game, Telephone? A message is whispered in someones ear, who in turn whispers in the ear of the next person. By the time the message is repeated to the originator, it is completely different! The same happens in business when instructions are passed on by word of mouth.