I’ll introduce my thoughts on Retirement-Driven Development (RDD).

Premise

While resignations often cause difficulties, there's no point in just listing disadvantages, so this time I want to focus on the advantages.

As the title “Retirement-Driven Development” suggests, I’ll also touch on using retirement as a trigger to drive development forward.

Benefits of Business Handover

Converting Tacit Knowledge to Explicit Knowledge

The handover timing creates an opportunity to convert tacit knowledge that only the departing person knew into explicit knowledge.

Specifically, tacit knowledge becomes explicit knowledge through processes such as:

• Documentation through handover materials
• Implementation into systems during the handover timing

While handovers themselves are difficult, being able to create specifications from tacit knowledge and implement them in systems can be considered an advantage.

Person-Dependent Tasks Are Identified

This overlaps with tacit knowledge content, but tasks where tacit knowledge exists are mostly person-dependent, and it's common for other people not to know that such tasks exist at all.

Wasteful Tasks Disappear

Another advantage is that wasteful tasks performed by the departing person disappear during the handover.

If the handover recipient has sufficient resources, that’s a different story, but in most cases it’s current work + α, so it’s difficult to take over everything. In such situations, I’ve often seen low-priority work naturally disappear during the handover process.

Response by Departing Person Case

Non-Engineer Case

Appropriate business improvements occur during the handover timing.

Also, depending on the business flow, it may be implemented in systems.

Engineer Case

Since we use Scrum development, handover work itself is unnecessary in most cases. The fact that tacit knowledge is difficult to create and person-dependency is less likely is one of the reasons we adopted Scrum development.

That’s all from the Gemba where I really wanted to write TDD (Taishoku-Driven Development) in the title, but refrained because it would have a different meaning.