Handover is a design constraint, not a phase
If the handover plan starts after the build, the system has already been designed to need you. Everything about how it was built assumed a team that was there for the decisions.
Joseph Nwachukwu, Director of Delivery ·
The dependency is designed in
A system built by a team that will leave looks different from one built by the team that will run it. The difference is not documentation. It is the hundred small decisions that made sense in context and are inscrutable without it.
Architecture decision records exist for this. They are cheap to write at the time and impossible to reconstruct afterwards.
Client engineers from week one
Joint teams from the start are slower for about a month and faster for the remaining duration. The client engineers who will operate the system are present for the decisions that shaped it, which is the only form of knowledge transfer that reliably works.
Agree the date at kickoff
Handover on a date fixed at the beginning, reviewed but rarely moved. An open-ended engagement drifts into an open-ended retainer, and nobody reviews a retainer.