How to get documentation and handover right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to documentation and handover is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.
Why this earns attention
Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- It should include credentials, hosting, and how to deploy
- If only one person can run it, you have a risk
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
If only one person can run it, you have a risk. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
Making it stick
How to tell if yours is fine
Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. 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 you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.