Your Detailer Is Retiring The standard was never a document. It was a person.

• The conventions exist, but only in one person's head and one person's habits.
• New starters learn by having their work corrected rather than by reading anything.
• Nobody else in the building can produce a set that comes back clean first time.
• When he is on holiday, drawings slow down and quality drifts, and everybody notices.
• You have tried to hire a replacement and either found nobody or found someone who draws differently.

Because the standard was never a document. It was a person.

That is not a failure of management. It is what happens when one capable individual does the same work well for decades. The conventions evolved to suit how your shop actually builds, they were correct, and writing them down would have felt like bureaucracy at every point along the way.

The cost only appears at the end, and by then the person who could write it down has one foot out of the door.

The single most useful thing is the Standards Record. Conventions, preferences, construction defaults and the details your shop reuses, written down once, versioned, and applied to every project after that. It is what stops the knowledge being a person.

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Send two of his recent sets. They contain most of the standard worth capturing.

Not a replacement for him.

Thirty years of judgement about how your shop builds is not something anyone arrives with. What can be done is capture what he knows and apply it consistently.

Not a project that has to finish before he leaves.

Capture happens through live work rather than through a documentation exercise, which is also the only way it stays accurate.

Not a decision about the rest of your detailing.

Some shops use this as the point to move drawing production out. Others capture the standard and keep drawing in-house. Both are reasonable.