Two weeks' notice, a successor starting Monday, and several months of tribal knowledge sitting in your head. The contractor handover is where reputations are made — and where most engagements quietly lose six months of context.
Here is the checklist that separates "they left a great handover" from "we're still finding things they knew".
1. The people map
The single most valuable thing you can leave is not documentation — it is who. For every person your successor will need:
- What they actually own (not their job title — their real remit)
- How to reach them ("Teams first, never Fridays", "email only if urgent")
- Their working pattern — especially the part-timers, because a Monday-only approver changes every deadline conversation
- Who covers them when they are away
2. The live commitments
- Active projects with honest status and real deadlines
- Open blockers — each with the named people who can resolve them, not just a ticket number
- The blockers that are about to collide — where the deadline lands while the only resolver is on leave or off-shift
3. The unwritten rules
- Departmental SLAs that exist nowhere in writing ("Procurement needs 10 working days, no exceptions")
- The recurring meetings that actually decide things
- Who to not surprise in a meeting
4. The keys
- Access requests still in flight
- Systems you'll lose access to that someone else must pick up
- Anything where you are currently the single point of failure
The compounding benefit
Do this well once and it becomes your signature. Clients remember the contractor whose successor was productive in week one — it is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.
OrgBearings builds the whole list as a side-effect of doing your job: the map you've been maintaining all along is the handover pack, exportable on your last day. See how handover works.