Operations handover

The best engagement is one the client no longer needs us for. Operations handover is the planned transfer of a running arrangement into the client's own team, with the documentation, practice and acceptance note that make the transfer real.

Handover as a project

We treat handover as a piece of work with a beginning, a middle and an end, scheduled months before the relationship changes.

• Inventory. Every arrangement we operate, written down with its owner, schedule and dependencies.
• Documentation. The briefs, the register, the change log, the closing notes and the review calendar, gathered in one place the client already uses.
• Practice. Working sessions in which the client's own people perform the routine tasks while we watch and answer questions.
• Escalation. A named contact for thirty days after handover, with agreed response times.
• Acceptance. A signed note stating what was transferred, what remains open, and who now owns each item.

Documentation that survives contact

Handover documents fail when they describe a system rather than a job. Ours are written as jobs: how to add a person, how to remove one, how to run the quarterly review, how to respond to the three most likely failures. Each job has a page, an owner and a review date. Anything that cannot be written as a job is either automated by the client's own team or recorded as a known gap — never quietly omitted.

Training without theatre

We do not run large presentations. We sit with two or three of the client's people, at their machines, and work through real tasks from a real queue. Afterwards each participant writes one page on what they did; those pages become part of the client's own runbook, in the client's own words. Documents written by the people who will use them are the only ones that survive a staff change.

Partial handovers

Some clients keep us for assurance and take routine operations in house; others do the reverse. Both work, provided the boundary is written. We prepare a short responsibility map that shows, for each task, whether the client performs it, we perform it, or we both watch it. A boundary nobody has written down is a boundary that will be tested by an incident.

After handover

We remain available on the agreed terms for thirty days, then move to a light assurance retainer if the client wishes. If the client wishes nothing further, that is a good outcome too: we leave the register current, the calendar populated and the runbook in the client's hands.