When Knowledge Walks Out the Door

Your radio system will outlast the people who know how to run it….

If this article caught your eye, it’s likely because you’ve been in this situation in the past, are experiencing it in the present, or are facing the future loss of a key member of your team.  In fact, every single radio system operator will face this problem at some point.

You may recognize this person:
They are a radio veteran. They have upwards of 20-30 years of experience.  They intimately understand your radio system (ASTRO, MOTOTRBO or otherwise), they recognize the talkgroups by number and remember the PL codes for critical channels. At an old site, they can look at the mass of equipment and know which punch down blocks are dormant, with wires that lead nowhere and which ones are live and servicing some critical, legacy circuit.  At newer sites they know everything from how to unlock the door or gate to the site, to the inventory of each rack and the last time the backup generator was tested.  

Based on years of experience with agencies and the professionals who make these systems run, you need to understand the magnitude of what is lost when such people leave, and steps you can take to make sure it’s not a crisis when they do.

Your Radio System is a Mesh of Subsystems

A radio system is made up of many subsystems that are intertwined to form a lifesaving and life preserving communications network that provides Voice, Data, Location Tracking, Paging, Messaging, Fire Station Alerting, etc…    The radio system includes the dispatch consoles (think MCC7500 or APX consoles, Intertalk, Zetron, Avtec, etc…). There are 911 system tie-ins, and nowadays there are cloud-based services to think of such as Motorola’s Command Central ecosystem.  There are multiple logging systems for phones and radio traffic as well (NICE, Verint, etc…). It’s all networked together with a mix of agency IP infrastructure and vendor-engineered IP infrastructure that must remain totally separate from each other except for specific firewalled routes.   Understanding the relationships between all of these subsystems is critically important and this understanding is often lost when key people depart from the agency.

The Radio System Doesn’t Know Anyone Left….
When your most knowledgeable radio person leaves, the radios don’t know.  The system keeps humming along on the Monday after the Friday that your key person left.  Also, NOBODY is expert in all aspects of ANY radio system (even the guru who just left).  It’s just not possible because there are far too many disciplines, and too many layers of granularity to which you could descend.  BUT, the people who have a mental map of the entirety of the interleaved subsystems are indispensable because they know what needs to be done in most situations.  This is the type of person this article is describing – the type of person you may be about to lose or who is gone already.

Navigating Your Radio System Requires a “Map”
The map is an understanding of which agencies share which resources, how they do it, and why:

  • Which decisions were deliberate and which were workarounds that somehow became permanent?
  • The details, history and operational reasons driving your fleetmap.
  • The history of problems that were solved, how they were solved, and which ones are likely to recur someday.

The map guides the processes by which a request for a change is vetted and implemented.  The relationships with outside vendors, with neighboring agency systems, and the folks who actually pick up the phone when something breaks at 2 a.m.   It is likely that very little of this map is written down. It probably lives in one person's head, or if you're lucky, two or three and it does NOT transfer in a two-week notice period or a hurried set of “notes for whoever’s next.”  Thus, when you replace a system manager, your new hire inherits a system that works but possibly with no explanation of how it got that way… which means the very first big change they make is made half-blind.  That’s the real exposure. Not that the radios stop, but that you lose the ability to grow and change the system safely, because the person who understood its logic is gone.

Retirements Are Looming

The engineers who deployed and operate today’s P25 and other digital radio systems mostly learned those skills back in the late 1990s and 2000s, when these networks were first going up. That whole generation is hitting retirement age nearly simultaneously, and the timing matters, because these are the very people who understand the original design intent for systems that are still in daily service.

The roster of engineers and techs behind those who are leaving is thin. Land mobile radio (LMR) is a narrow, deeply technical specialty that requires special knowledge in RF engineering and IP networking, and insufficient numbers of new people come into it every year. The job market tells the story all by itself: on any given day job boards are carrying a multitude of open system manager, field engineer and other LMR tech positions. Most of the knowledgeable and experienced people who are available get recruited away by manufacturers, dealers and private industry that can move faster and often pay better than many public agencies can.

So, you are getting squeezed from both ends at the same time. The people who know the most are heading out the door, and the people who could replace them are scarce. This is a critical shortage in a technical specialty that public safety simply cannot run without.

The Hiring Conundrum (and a solution…)

There is another obstacle that can be extremely frustrating: Even when you see the problem coming and you WANT to fix it, you may be hamstrung by your own hiring processes.

Public-sector hiring is slow by design. Civil-service requisitions, posting rules, and approval chains can extend the process of hiring into timescales measured by quarters instead of weeks. Also, possible salary ranges may be fixed by statute or collective bargaining agreements, and they sometimes can’t compete with the salary an experienced and talented radio engineer could command outside of government service. Your headcount may even be frozen at times. In the cruelest irony of all, even if an agency does manage to hire, there is often no senior person left to train the new personnel because the knowledgeable, senior person is exactly who you lost.

So… a truly critical personnel requisition stays open. Work piles up. Programming changes get put off or are done poorly. Documentation falls further behind, and the system drifts a little further from optimum and starts to migrate beyond anyone’s full understanding of it.

This may sound dire, but there is a solution, and a lot of agencies have already found it: Agencies and operators can very often fund a contract for services when traditional hiring is blocked or delayed. Operating expenses and professional services expenses play by different rules than personnel budgets. An agency that has been told it can’t add any headcount can frequently still bring in outside expertise to perform the very same duties… with no requisition, no recruiting timeline, and without the multi-year commitment of a permanent hire.  You can achieve continuity and avoid a dangerous knowledge vacuum.

What Knowledge Continuity Actually Looks Like

Done right, operational continuity isn’t a heroic rescue mission after the knowledge is already gone. It is a steady, expert layer that sits alongside your team and survives the turnover that would otherwise knock you back to square one. Below are two actual Allenfort & Associates, Inc. customer examples. They are shared without agency names to protect the innocent…

Trunked IP Simulcast ASTRO25 Customer:

A major, west-coast metropolis illustrates the benefits quite well. Facing a retirement-induced knowledge vacuum, they contracted our firm not just to cover specific support functions, but to help rebuild their bench. That meant bringing the city’s senior staff and apprentices through multiple sessions of real-world, structured training so they actually understand the radio system they’re going to inherit.  Projects also involved overhauling the city’s entire codeplug development and maintenance process so it is documented, repeatable, and no longer riding on one person’s memory. When a complex multi-path interference issue became too bothersome to ignore, we were there to help troubleshoot and came up with both short and long-term solutions to support their airborne law enforcement units.  When warranted, we smooth interactions with the manufacturer when only they can provide what is needed to craft real solutions to real problems. Contracting for these capabilities solved problems that hiring, under their budget and time constraints, simply could not.

MOTOTRBO Capacity Max Customer

A multi-state electricity cooperative that owns and maintains a large multi-site mission-critical Motorola trunked radio system experienced what every agency dreads: repeated turnover in the top-level staff responsible for the system.  This occurred twice over the span of two years. Normally each of those departures would have meant a scramble, a long learning curve, and a period of elevated risk. Instead, because of their support contract with our firm, radio system operations never missed a beat – and problems that cropped up were handled with great expediency.  Having concierge-level system support enabled them to bypass the manufacturer’s own technical support and save priceless time for many thorny system questions, system upgrades and even dealing with system failures. Their key internal staff departed without their core capabilities changing. The knowledge didn’t walk out the door, because part of it was deliberately duplicated outside the door.  In addition, our knowledge and support provided clarity and leverage when the time came to renew service agreements with the system manufacturer.  

Notice the similarity in both stories. Outside expertise isn’t a band-aid. It IS the continuity, the steady piece that lets your own people turn over, train up, and grow without the system losing its institutional memory every single time.

This Isn’t About Replacing Your People
The instinct to be a little wary of outside help is a healthy one, and the worry behind it is almost always the same: if we bring in a consultant, won’t we be stuck depending on them forever?

Done without any planning, sure, that’s a real risk. Done right, it is the exact opposite of what happens.

The right partner makes your agency:

  • More capable, not more dependent. They document what was never written down.
  • Better staffed for the long haul. They train the personnel who are your actual long-term answer.
  • Less fragile. They turn one person’s undocumented know-how into a repeatable process your whole team can follow.

The goal of concierge support is NOT to make you forever dependent. It is to make sure that the next time somebody retires or resigns, your agency’s knowledge does not retire along with them.

Why This Matters Now

Every budget cycle, more experts reach the end of their careers and the pipeline behind them isn’t refilling fast enough to keep up. Waiting until there is a knowledge vacuum makes everything harder and far more expensive to address.  At that point you’re rebuilding understanding from scratch instead of capturing it from someone who still has the keys to the castle.  Doing it the right way is always the easy way in the near, mid and long term.

The agencies handling this the right way are treating continuity as something to build before the gap opens, not after. They are locking in the expert layer, documenting the institutional memory while it still exists, and training the next generation purposefully.

If you have any questions about any of the topics mentioned in this article, please feel free to contact Allenfort & Associates, Inc.

Allenfort & Associates, Inc. provides expert Radio Management System cloud hosting, concierge radio system support, staffing, training and consulting for ASTRO 25 and MOTOTRBO radio systems. We are trusted consultants for system operators throughout North America.