Getting started with documentation and handover
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to documentation and handover for teams who have not touched it before.
Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
Why it matters
Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- It should include credentials, hosting, and how to deploy
- Change one thing and measure it
If only one person can run it, you have a risk. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
In practice
Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about documentation and handover before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- It should include credentials, hosting, and how to deploy — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.