Technical Handover
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Test the handover by asking a new competent person to run, deploy, diagnose, and recover the product.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain technical handover in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Test the handover by asking a new competent person to run, deploy, diagnose, and recover the product.
- Recognise this material risk: documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier.
- Use this review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong. This lesson gives you a concrete question to take into a build brief, proposal review, or product decision.
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? The course example is A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations; use it to decide what evidence would justify the choice before a builder implements it.
What Does Technical Handover Mean for Your Product?
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong.
Use the illustrative service for this course (A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations) to make the choice concrete. Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident?
Technical term
Technical Handover
Technical handover transfers the knowledge, accounts, source, configuration, operational procedures, and decision history needed to continue the product.
How Should a Founder Use Technical Handover?
For a small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations, ask what would happen if documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier.
For this decision, the useful standard is that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Decision: Test the handover by asking a new competent person to run, deploy, diagnose, and recover the product.
- Evidence to request: show that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Owner: name who will respond if documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier.
- Record the result in the security, ownership, and handover record.
- Practical review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
How Do You Choose an Approach to Technical Handover?
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Test the handover by asking a new competent person to run, deploy, diagnose, and recover the product.
The risk is that documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier. Compare a simpler option with the proposed one, including who will operate either choice.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
What Evidence Should You Accept for Technical Handover?
What Warning Signs Should You Look For?
- The proposal does not address this risk: documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier.
- Nobody can show whether access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- The decision has no named owner or review point.
What Should You Ask a Consultant?
- What changes for the user if we choose this approach to technical handover?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier.
- Can you demonstrate that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual?
- Who owns the result, and when will we reconsider it?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
Test the handover by asking a new competent person to run, deploy, diagnose, and recover the product. Ask for evidence against the specific risk: documents exist but the company remains dependent on undocumented knowledge held by one supplier.