Integration Handover: What Your Business Should Receive

An integration is harder to support when only its original developer knows where it runs. Handover should give the business enough information to operate it, request changes and move to another supplier if necessary.

Document the business journey

Start with a simple description of triggers, records, decisions and completion states. Add the field mapping and important exceptions. The diagram should help staff understand the work, not merely reproduce every technical component.

Make ownership explicit

List the business-controlled accounts, subscription responsibilities and people authorised to change the workflow. Record where credentials are managed without including the secrets in a broadly shared document. Identify any dependency on a provider's paid plan or usage allowance.

• Include installation or deployment instructions where relevant.
• Explain monitoring, retries and manual recovery.
• Provide tested acceptance scenarios and known limits.
• Define backup/export arrangements for business data.
• Agree on maintenance and change-request responsibilities.

Ask another operator to follow it

A useful acceptance exercise is to let an authorised staff member locate a test failure and identify the recovery step using only the handover. If they need the developer to translate every screen, improve the documentation before calling the project complete.

Separate documentation from ongoing support

A handover does not mean every future software update or feature request is included. Confirm the support period, covered defects and route for additional work. Clear documentation and clear scope protect both the business and the person maintaining its integrations.