What do you do if your team members are retiring and you want to ensure a smooth transition?

To ensure a smooth transition as team members retire, establish a succession plan, document key processes and knowledge, provide training for successors, and facilitate open communication among team members. Recognize retirees' contributions, celebrate their achievements, and foster a supportive environment for both departing and incoming team members to promote continuity and collaboration.

Handle the knowledge transfer as a mini project. When creating the knowledge transfer plan identify all the areas to be handed over, how it will be handed over and who it will be handed over to and the time required. You need to consider the skills of the person(s) that it will be handed over to - do they need any training, etc. in order to receive the handover. Consider the risks and have mitigation plans in place. Plan for overlap, for each area handed over, the "new" person should take over the work whilst the retiree is still around to support. Be clear where the knowledge will be stored (e.g. Word / DevOps, etc.), how it will be managed. The documentation should be coupled with a recorded handover session (let AI transcribe).

Start by making knowledge transfer a part of the backlog, ensuring it's accounted for in terms of capacity for both the person retiring and those accepting the knowledge. Identify key areas that will be lost, and plan for the transition in advance. Encourage the retiring team member to document their processes and important information, and consider organizing KT sessions with their replacement or other team members. Identify a successor or interim replacement early on, and provide them with training and support. Communicate openly with the team about the retirement and the transition plan. Finally, celebrate the retiree's contributions!

Consider working closely with the retiring team members to document their knowledge, processes and best practices before they depart. Foster pair programming and, in general, knowledge transfer sessions, creating documentation or recording video tutorials to capture critical information and insights that may be lost once the retirées are no longer part of the Organization. A responsible software project manager must ensure that valuable knowledge is preserved and can be passed on to the remaining team members or new hires.

Create wayback workshops for the junior engineers. Reconstruct the old Java monolith by refactoring the rust microservice; "Prod2Zero".

Succession planning involves identifying and developing internal talent to fill key roles. By proactively grooming successors, you ensure continuity of leadership and minimize disruptions to workflow. This approach also fosters a sense of stability and confidence among the team, knowing that there are capable individuals ready to step into new roles seamlessly.

In a healthy development team, the identification of suitable replacements or successors for retiring members should be a relatively natural process and a precipitate of a consolidated culture of sharing. Such transitions should be eased ahead with opportunities for training, mentoring and onboarding before detachments occur; this involves cross-training and pair programming between existing team members, hiring new talent with the necessary skills and expertise and fostering the spontaneous partake of responsibilities within the group to ensure continuity and coverage of essential tasks.

Scrum Teams are supposed to be cross-functional and self-organizing. One of the goals is that the loss of a team member should not greatly affect the team. This is why when volunteering for work/user stories, the entire team estimates, discusses and refines each and every user story together so everyone is always in-the-know about all work. Every developer should be able to complete every user story. If this is not the case, the team should always be working toward that goal. This mitigates risk during team turnover. This also makes each developer more valuable and skilled.