Documentation and handover for small teams

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Most advice about documentation and handover assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

Handover is a deliverable, not a courtesy. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.

What good looks like

If only one person can run it, you have a risk. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

In practice

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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.