Documentation and handover: the questions we get asked most

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. The questions about documentation and handover that come up most often on our calls.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Do we need to care about this?

Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

How do we know it is working?

If only one person can run it, you have a risk. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What this looks like day to day

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Three things worth confirming about documentation and handover before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.