The real cost of ignoring documentation and handover

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Nobody bills you for neglecting documentation and handover. The cost shows up somewhere else.

The projects that go badly are rarely the ones with the hardest technical problems. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

It should include credentials, hosting, and how to deploy. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Where to go from here

If only one person can run it, you have a risk. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. 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
• 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

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.