Four doors into the same library

Sector overlays

The audit is deliberately neutral. Each overlay translates it into the language of your setting and adds the risks it cannot know about.

The underlying failure is the same everywhere. One person holds something, nobody else can pick it up, and nothing goes wrong until it does.

The vocabulary is not the same, and neither are the specifics. A charity has statutory roles it must fill. A company has a continuity plan that covers the building and not the people. An open source project can lose the ability to publish while the code stays perfectly safe.

So the bus factor audit is written to work anywhere, and each overlay adds four things: a map of what the terms are called in your setting, the audit rows a neutral document cannot carry, the failure that setting most often turns out to have, and a worked example.

  1. Overlay

    Open source projects

    Maintainers, release keys, governance and what a fork really tests.

    The usual failure: Ownership resting in a personal account. Losing the maintainer does not lose the code, it loses the ability to ship.

  2. Overlay

    Charities and NGOs

    Trustees, funders, regulators and the roles somebody is legally required to hold.

    The usual failure: Roles a regulator requires you to name, held by one person with no deputy.

  3. Overlay

    Companies

    The key person risk your business continuity plan does not cover.

    The usual failure: Systems nobody owns, kept alive by somebody who never escalated.

  4. Overlay

    Small teams and collectives

    Where one person carries most of the operation and nobody has ever counted.

    The usual failure: Everything ended up in one person's name, and it happened by accident.

How to use one

Read the overlay first, which takes a few minutes, then work through the audit with its extra rows added to yours. The overlay ends by naming the scenario cards worth running first for that setting.

If you sit across two of these, and plenty of organisations do, read both. They overlap less than you would expect.

If none of them fit

The overlays cover the settings the material has been tested against so far. If yours is missing, or one of them nearly fits but gets something wrong, say so. That is how the existing four got written.