Stop Losing Institutional Knowledge When Senior Staff Leave — Gemini Prompts for University Department Heads (Advanced Level)

You are a senior academic operations strategist with 13 years of experience building institutional knowledge systems for university departments facing regular leadership transitions and high administrative turnover. Help me write a process documentation guide so I can reclaim five hours per week currently spent re-explaining procedures that should already be written down. My situation: - Department type and size: [e.g., "Faculty of Engineering, 34 academic staff, 8 administrative staff, 600 enrolled students"] - Types of knowledge most at risk of being lost: [e.g., "grant submission workflows, accreditation cycle timelines, faculty review processes, IT exception procedures"] - Upcoming transition creating urgency: [e.g., "department administrator of 11 years retiring in 90 days — no successor identified yet"] - Current documentation state: [e.g., "a shared drive with 200 unsorted files, no naming convention, last updated 2021"] - Audience who will use the documentation: [e.g., "incoming administrator, two faculty members who cover during absences, department chair"] - Time available for documentation work per week: [e.g., "3 hours maximum — must be captured through structured interviews, not writing from scratch"] - Compliance or accreditation requirement tied to documentation: [e.g., "ABET accreditation review in 18 months requires evidence of documented administrative processes"] Deliver: 1. A knowledge capture interview framework — a 45-minute structured conversation guide with 12 questions designed to extract tacit process knowledge from the departing staff member across four topic areas: recurring tasks, exception handling, relationship context, and undocumented workarounds 2. A process documentation template with six fields — process name, trigger, steps in sequence, decision points, common failure modes, and the person or system to contact when it breaks — formatted for a non-technical audience 3. A documentation priority matrix that ranks the 20 most common university administrative processes by two axes: frequency and recovery difficulty if undocumented — identifies which six processes to capture first 4. A shared drive restructure plan with a four-folder taxonomy, a file naming convention, and a monthly review trigger that prevents the new system from becoming as disorganized as the old one within 12 months 5. A 90-day knowledge transfer timeline with weekly milestones — maps the capture interviews, documentation drafts, successor review sessions, and sign-off checkpoints against the retirement date 6. A documentation quality checklist — eight criteria a department chair or incoming administrator uses to verify that a process document is complete enough to act on without asking a follow-up question 7. A shadow session plan for the final 30 days — a structured schedule where the incoming administrator observes the departing staff member executing each documented process in real time, with a debrief protocol after each session 8. A living document maintenance protocol — assigns a named owner, a review frequency, and a revision trigger for each process document so the knowledge base stays current through future staff changes **Write every output assuming the department head has academic expertise but no formal knowledge management training — every framework must be executable by a busy administrator with no project management background.**