A team member is sick and will be away for several weeks. At the daily meeting the team is concerned because that person was the only one with the skills for a specific component. What should the project manager have done to prevent this situation?

The correct answer is facilitating cross-functional knowledge transfer. This practice ensures that critical knowledge and skills are not siloed with a single individual, thereby reducing project risk associated with resource unavailability. By cross-training team members, the project maintains continuity even if a key person is absent. Assigning more than one skilled resource for each component, while helpful, can be inefficient and costly, and may not always be feasible. Outsourcing development might introduce new risks, such as communication overhead or loss of control, and doesn't address the internal knowledge gap. Requiring comprehensive documentation is a good practice for knowledge retention but doesn't immediately solve the problem of a missing team member who held unique skills; it's a reactive measure rather than a proactive risk mitigation strategy for skill dependency.