A company has three experienced employees who understand its billing exceptions. They helped design the rules, know which records can be trusted, and can usually explain why an unexpected charge appeared. Management treats that expertise as an existing resource when planning the next platform change.
The three employees are gradually moved into coordination and approval work. The platform changes, new staff inherit parts of the process, and the automated assistant handles more routine queries. Two years later, the company still lists the same experts in its support plan, although none has recently worked through an unfamiliar billing failure from beginning to end.
The planning error is to treat capability as a permanent stock acquired when people were hired or trained. Expertise has continuing support costs: exposure to relevant work, renewal as the system changes, access to evidence, and development of other people. Knowledge depreciation is a useful economic lens for those costs, provided it is applied to task capability rather than treated as a measure of a person’s worth.
Separate loss of practice from change in the task
A capability can become less useful for several reasons. Someone may receive fewer opportunities to exercise it. The relevant technology or policy may change. Knowledge may remain with a departing employee, or a team may lose the working relationships through which it used to resolve difficult cases.
These mechanisms call for different responses. Practice can help retain a still-relevant method. Learning is needed when the method has changed. Knowledge transfer can reduce dependence on one person, while a redesigned interface or access arrangement may restore a capability that staff possess but cannot currently use.
In Darr, Argote, and Epple’s study of service organisations, production experience, knowledge depreciation, and knowledge transfer were examined using data from pizza franchises. The study found depreciation and differences in transfer across organisational boundaries. It supports treating organisational knowledge as dynamic, without supplying a general annual depreciation rate for professional expertise.
A billing organisation should therefore resist assigning a single percentage to the value of its experts. Identify the tasks that matter, the evidence that staff can perform them, and the changes that could invalidate that evidence. This produces a more useful planning record than a numerical estimate with little connection to actual work.
Define the unit of capability you need to maintain
A job title is too broad to establish readiness. For billing exceptions, relevant capabilities might include reconstructing an account history, interpreting the current allocation policy, identifying a failed migration, and correcting an error without introducing another inconsistency.
Each has a different maintenance requirement. Policy interpretation needs access to current decisions. Migration diagnosis may require practice with representative data and tools. Safe correction needs both judgment and the authority to use the relevant process. Someone who understands the rules but lacks access cannot perform the complete operational task.
Record the required coverage as well. A capability available from one person during office hours differs from one needed across a continuous service. Succession planning should account for leave, competing duties, and the time a learner requires to become dependable. Counting names without examining availability can overstate resilience.
The distinction from skills going unpractised is one of planning scope. Individual retention is part of the issue. The organisation must also preserve the tools, relationships, authority, and staffing through which knowledge becomes usable capability.
Make renewal costs visible in the operating plan
Suppose a team of six reserves two hours per person each week for supervised exception work and updating its shared procedures. That requires twelve staff-hours. It is an illustrative capacity allocation, not a recommended universal training allowance.
A delivery plan that assumes all those hours remain available for routine throughput has omitted the maintenance activity. Staff may then complete it after hours, reduce its depth, or postpone it until a failure exposes the gap. Calling development important does not resolve the conflict in the schedule.
| Capability requirement | Continuing activity to account for |
|---|---|
| Understand current rules | Review changes and resolve ambiguous examples |
| Diagnose uncommon failures | Work through representative cases with feedback |
| Provide cover for a specialist | Supervised practice and demonstrated handover |
| Use current tools safely | Access maintenance and relevant system exercises |
| Recover from a disrupted workflow | Rehearsal of the actual fallback arrangement |
The appropriate investment depends on what the service requires. Some skills can be sustained through ordinary work; others need separate exercises because the relevant situation occurs rarely. Where the required practice exceeds available capacity, change the plan, coverage, or service design instead of leaving an unsupported assurance in the risk register.
HSE’s competence guidance stresses linking competence to tasks and operating conditions. Its safety context is specific, but its distinction between training activity and capability is useful when deciding what the expenditure is meant to achieve.
Evaluate savings over the whole operating arrangement
Automation may reduce routine processing while increasing the importance of exception handling. That can be a worthwhile change. Its business case should include the time and resources required to sustain the exception capability on which the new arrangement depends.
For example, fewer people may need to know every manual coding step, while a smaller specialist group needs stronger diagnostic knowledge and coverage. The savings are credible only if the specialist arrangement can handle demand, retain access, and develop successors. Removing routine work may also remove the easiest learning cases for those successors.
Look beyond training expenditure. The costs can include supervision, practice environments, reference data, specialist backfill, and time to maintain procedures after a change. Some are shared with ordinary service improvement, so avoid counting the same activity twice when comparing options.
Also examine who absorbs the work. An apparent reduction in support effort may depend on project teams repeatedly explaining undocumented rules or customers supplying information the organisation once knew how to retrieve. A complete cost account should not make those transfers disappear.
Treat handover as performance with support
A departing expert can leave a well-written account of the billing rules while a successor still struggles to diagnose a new exception. Documentation preserves explicit information; it does not automatically reproduce the ability to select relevant evidence and apply it under uncertainty.
Use the remaining overlap to let the successor lead representative cases. The expert can observe where the learner searches, which assumptions they make, and when they ask for help. Record the unresolved gaps and give the learner another opportunity to apply the explanation in a changed case.
A useful handover result states what the successor can do independently, what still requires supervision, and which unusual situations remain untested. The result can then inform coverage and escalation arrangements. An attendance record or a folder marked complete supplies much less operational information.
Avoid loading all transfer work onto the same expert while retaining their full delivery target. Transfer competes for the expert’s attention and can reduce short-term output. That is part of the succession investment, not necessarily evidence that the handover process is inefficient.
Retire capability with an explicit replacement
Maintaining every old skill indefinitely is not a sensible objective. A decommissioned billing platform may no longer need an active expert roster. It may still need an archive and a bounded way to investigate historical records, depending on the organisation’s requirements.
State which tasks are being retired, which are moving to a supplier, and which remain internal. Where expertise is outsourced, retain enough capability to specify the work, assess its results, and recognise when escalation is necessary. A supplier arrangement changes the capability requirement rather than making the need to understand outcomes vanish.
Review the plan when the system, staffing, or automation changes. The relevant evidence is recent enough and representative enough to support the current responsibility; there is no universal refresh interval for every task. Feedback on expertise helps determine whether staff are learning from the decisions they continue to make.
Review capability before committing a change
A platform migration is a useful point to test the plan. Identify who can interpret an unexpected balance in the new system, which historical records they need, and whether the relevant tools remain available after the old platform is switched off. The capability may cross the boundary between old and new systems even when the delivery plan treats them as separate phases.
Include the necessary overlap, access, and investigation work in the change budget. If a critical diagnostic task has not yet been demonstrated, record the gap and establish how the service will operate while it is resolved. A nominal training completion date does not settle that operational question.
Use the same approach when a key employee changes role or a supplier takes over part of the service. Reassess which capability remains internal, what evidence supports the handover, and when another review is needed. This makes renewal a consequence of a known change to the work rather than a generic annual activity.
The economic lens is useful when it makes those commitments visible. Expertise can support years of dependable work, but its usefulness depends on a changing environment and an operating arrangement that sustains it. Budget for the required capability, demonstrate that it exists, and revise the plan when the work no longer provides the experience the organisation assumes.
