Real Story Here. A colleague and I developed a training course on the Foundations of DevOps. We started the course off with a discussion about risk in Software Delivery and IT in general. Attendees would often surface the "Key-Person Risk" or the "Hit by a Bus Risk" to which we would use as a teachable moment for pair programming, cross pollination, and measuring and improving the time it takes for new joins to become productive with the systems and or code base. We would illustrate that one of the ways we mitigated the Key Person Risk with the course was to always deliver it in pairs.
My colleague was tragically struck by a car and killed about three months ago. The course suffered an immense blow to the knowledge capital it had - but due to the fact that we had planned to mitigate against key-person risk by pairing - the course was able to survive and retain a fair bit of the legacy my colleague left behind.
I just share this to say that the getting "hit by a bus" scenario is something that, much like this post, we throw around in jest and treat in a laissez-faire fashion. The fact is that it is a tragic, unimaginable, event that does in fact occur from time to time and something I will take seriously for the rest of my life.
My colleague was tragically struck by a car and killed about three months ago. The course suffered an immense blow to the knowledge capital it had - but due to the fact that we had planned to mitigate against key-person risk by pairing - the course was able to survive and retain a fair bit of the legacy my colleague left behind.
I just share this to say that the getting "hit by a bus" scenario is something that, much like this post, we throw around in jest and treat in a laissez-faire fashion. The fact is that it is a tragic, unimaginable, event that does in fact occur from time to time and something I will take seriously for the rest of my life.