Someone has to own it after the team leaves.

How a takeover runs

Discovery: two weeks, paid

Two paid weeks before anything larger is signed. We read the code, the deploy path, and the incident history, then write down what the system does, what it costs to keep running, and what will break first. Discovery ends with a proposed handover date and the list of things that have to be true on it. If the honest answer is that you need one engineer for six months rather than four for a year, the document says that. Discovery is billed whether or not the larger engagement follows, which makes it the cheapest point at which either side can walk away.

Taking ownership

Ramp-up onto a system nobody can explain still runs 10–15 business days, so from week three the team of 3–4 holds it: the rota, the failing jobs, the changes nobody currently has the standing to approve. The first month goes on whatever is costing the most hours, not on the architecture we would have chosen. We do not rewrite what you inherited onto the ten technologies we normally staff against — a rewrite you did not ask for leaves you with a second system nobody owns. What we do replace is whatever is failing often enough to pay for itself inside the engagement, and that case gets made in writing before the work starts.

Writing it down

The part that outlasts us is written: a runbook for each recurring failure, a deploy and rollback path someone can follow at 3 a.m., and an account of which pieces are load-bearing and which are dead. The handover date is what forces this to be written while we are still there to correct it, rather than in the last fortnight.

Handover, then exit

Handover means documented and staffed: named people, in-house or hired during the engagement, who have run the system with us watching rather than the other way round. EU clients get a full working day of overlap while that training happens. Either side can end the engagement on 30 days' notice once the three-month minimum has run, and the exit date set in discovery is the one we plan every month against. An extension is a decision you make with the runbooks already in your hands, not one you make because nobody else can run the system.