How a global industrials leader eliminated tribal knowledge and deployed payroll in half the time

Eliminating Key Person Risk Before It Became a Crisis

Rolling out payroll on an enterprise platform is one of the highest-stakes projects an organization can undertake. Every configuration decision cascades. Every missed dependency surfaces in someone’s paycheck.

In most organizations, the knowledge required to execute that rollout lives in the heads of a handful of people — people who might leave, get promoted, go on medical leave, or simply forget what they did six months ago.

For a global industrials company with 14,000 employees across 40+ sites, this wasn’t a theoretical risk. It was the single largest threat to their payroll deployment timeline.

The VP of Enterprise Applications had seen this movie before. A critical implementation kicks off. Senior architects and functional leads carry the project. Decisions happen in hallway conversations. Configuration rationale lives in personal notebooks. Testing logic is buried in Slack threads no one can find later.

The project succeeds — barely. Six months later, when something breaks or an audit question surfaces, no one can reconstruct why a choice was made. Documentation never happened because everyone was too busy doing the work. The organization becomes hostage to whoever remembers.

Key person risk is the silent killer of enterprise implementations. It rarely shows up clearly in project plans or risk registers.

It shows up when:

• A lead payroll architect resigns

• A benefits lead goes on leave

• An auditor asks about a past configuration change

Most teams know this risk exists. Few have systems to mitigate it. They rely on outdated SharePoint folders, stale Confluence pages, and good intentions without real capture mechanisms.

“We were about to deploy payroll across 40+ sites with 14,000 employees, and the thing that kept me up at night wasn’t the configuration complexity — it was the fact that everything we needed to know about why we built it this way lived in three people’s heads.”

Mando’s passive capture technology changed the calculus. From the start of payroll configuration, every session was recorded as structured, searchable, replayable documentation.

Every click path, field edit, and configuration decision was captured with full context. No start/stop buttons. No extra process. Documentation became a byproduct of the work itself.

The VP of Enterprise Applications didn’t need to ask for documentation — it was already happening.

Passive capture became the foundation for active documentation. Using Mando’s AI Docs, the team generated training guides, configuration runbooks, and troubleshooting playbooks directly from captured sessions. What used to take four hours now took fifteen minutes. Within 90 days, the team created 400+ AI-powered documents — living, searchable artifacts anyone could follow with confidence.

Payroll went live ahead of schedule — not because of longer hours or more consultants, but because the knowledge bottleneck was eliminated.

Team members searched Mando instead of scheduling meetings. Training guides already existed. Knowledge wasn’t trapped in individuals anymore.

Key people remained valuable — but their knowledge was no longer fragile.