Five mistakes teams make with documentation and handover

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit documentation and handover.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy
• It should include credentials, hosting, and how to deploy
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

If only one person can run it, you have a risk. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

What to do next

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• If only one person can run it, you have a risk — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.