Three myths about documentation and handover

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few things about documentation and handover that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“It only matters for big sites”

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.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

“Our platform handles it”

If only one person can run it, you have a risk. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

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
• 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 want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.