Great explication of some of the nuances encountered with this pathology. This is one of many areas where the art of consulting (that is, sufficient experience

Great explication of some of the nuances encountered with this pathology. This is one of many areas where the art of consulting (that is, sufficient experience to start pattern-matching new clients' behaviors) steps into the picture. The delicate balance to effect here is employing the techniques you outlined, against the deliverables and maintaining good working relationships with staff you depend upon to deliver to you information you need to accomplish what you were brought in for. Unless you correctly read your client organization and staff who you will be interacting with, and correspondingly pad your estimates, carrying out these techniques become mostly or all unbillable work. The technique of doing a pomo works really well for issues above a certain complexity level. Often I can get a manager to enthusiastically sign off on incrementally adding to the engagement on a time and materials basis on top of the outcome-based fee I bill for such knowledge transfers, typically as one or a series of lunch and learns. Below a complexity level (for example, "how do I enable tracing in <foo>?"), and it rapidly becomes nonsensical, and I use a lightweight (to the consultant) version of what you recommended. Depending upon the personalities involved, and facilities available, I usually ask for the request be re-framed as a ticket "so the entire team can learn now from the answer, and datamine the knowledge base in the future", and I suggest to the manager that the requester be officially tasked with documenting the answer into the team's official documentation repository with an official documentation template, that a project manager will then start chasing down. I also recommend someone else on the team "QA" the documentation by performing the procedure as documented. The documentation doesn't have to be fancy, even a single paragraph suffices in some cases, but usually there is a lot of red tape involved. This delivers genuine benefits from the leadership's perspective, and for genuine "the organization didn't know how to do this", it does advance the organization's capabilities. The bonus for the consultant is it puts you back in the consulting seat, where you point towards how it is done in sufficient detail so someone can put together the steps (you might call out one or more particularly tricky steps, but usually just pointing in the right direction is enough), but the person doing the asking becomes responsible for proving and documenting the steps to their peers, project manager and manager. This cuts down on the frivolous requests to pretty much trivial amounts in my personal experience, without compromising on leadership's nor staff's desires.