How we hand over integration projects

An integration is only finished when someone else can run it without us. Here is the checklist we use.

Integration projects connect systems that were never designed to talk to each other: an online shop and an accounting package, a booking tool and a calendar, a warehouse spreadsheet and a shipping service. Building the connection is usually the shorter part of the work. Making sure the client's team can run, change and troubleshoot it after we leave takes deliberate effort, so we treat the handover as a deliverable with its own checklist.

1. A one-page overview

The first document answers four questions in plain language: which systems are connected, what moves between them, how often, and what happens when one side is unavailable. It includes a simple diagram. Anyone in the company should be able to read it in five minutes and understand what the integration is for.

2. Credentials in one known place

Integrations depend on keys and passwords for several services. We list every credential the integration uses, where it is stored, who can rotate it, and what breaks if it expires. The values themselves stay in the client's password manager, never in documents or code.

3. Health checks anyone can run

Each integration comes with a small set of checks: is the last sync recent, did the record counts match, are there items waiting in an error queue. We show the team where to look and what normal values are, so that a quick glance in the morning is enough to know everything is fine.

4. Common failures and their fixes

During development and the first weeks of operation we keep a log of everything that went wrong. Before handover we turn it into a short table: symptom, likely cause, what to do. Expired tokens, renamed fields in a spreadsheet and rate limits from a third-party service account for most real-world problems, and each has a simple fix.

5. A rehearsal

We do not consider the handover complete until someone on the client's team has performed a routine task without our help: rerunning a failed sync, rotating a key, or adding a new product category to a mapping table. We sit next to them, but we keep our hands off the keyboard. Any step where they hesitate goes back into the documentation.

6. A quiet period

For a few weeks after handover we remain available for questions, and we track what people ask. If the same question comes up twice, the answer belongs in the documents. After that, the integration is theirs — which is exactly how it should be.