Key-person risk

It is rarely a deliberate decision. One person set up the hosting, so they hold it; they built the integration, so only they understand it; they know the client's real requirements, because those were agreed by phone. Each step is reasonable and the aggregate is a company whose website, mail and pipeline depend on a single individual's continued goodwill and availability.

The test is a question, asked out loud: if this person did not come back on Monday, what would we be unable to do? The answers are the risk register, and each one has a cheap fix — a second administrator, a written runbook, credentials in a shared vault, a repository the company controls.

The concentration is worst where it is least examined: the person who is trusted. Trust is a reason to give someone access; it is not a reason to give them exclusive access, and conflating the two is how well-run companies end up with no way to reach their own DNS.

Treating it as a loyalty question

Raising the subject is heard as suspicion, so it is not raised. But the common causes are not betrayal — they are illness, a visa that did not renew, a better offer, or an account recovery that failed. Frame it as continuity, document it once, and it stops being about any individual.

A definition sits still. This does not.

The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.

From an enquiry arriving to somebody answering it

A message from a person who might buy, travelling from the form they filled to somebody who can actually answer what they asked. 6 steps, one inbox per channel, and a person per inbox is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.

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From a brief to work somebody has accepted

A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier. 6 steps, acceptance by demonstration is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

M&A audit and deal review

Price the system you are buying, not the one in the data room.

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Platform and transactional architecture

The domain model is the product. Everything above it is an interface to it.

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Anti-crisis engineering and recovery

Stabilise before you improve. A system under stress cannot absorb a redesign.

Offboarding

The sequence that removes a departing person's access to everything, in an order that does not lock the company out of its own systems on the way.

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Digital asset register

A written list of every account, domain and system the business depends on, recording who owns it, who administers it, what it costs and how it is recovered.

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Handover

The point at which a vendor's work becomes the company's property — defined by what is transferred, not by the project being finished.

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Named accounts and shared credentials

Access issued to a person rather than to a login everyone uses — the difference between being able to revoke one person and having to change everything.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.