Handing your team over

Do it in May, not August

The handover has to happen while the people leaving are still around and still remember. In August they have gone, and what they knew is unrecoverable at any price.

Put a date on it in the season calendar at kickoff: one session, after the last event, before the seniors scatter. Calling it a handover rather than a clear-out is most of the work.

Accounts and logins kill more teams than money does

The most common fatal handover failure is mundane: the team email account was a student's personal address, the registration login was set up by a mentor who left, and the social media password went with someone who no longer answers messages.

Fix it structurally rather than by writing passwords down. Team accounts belong to the team (the official registration login, the team email, the shared drive, the chat, the website, the social accounts) with at least two current people, one of them an adult, holding access to each. Do the audit in May and transfer anything sitting under a leaver's name.

Mail is the one that resists being transferred, because there is nothing to hand over: forwarding an address does not move four years of threads out of the account they were received in. A shared inbox owned by the team is the version of this that needs no handover at all: access is a role permission, so a graduating member loses it and the archive stays.

The five things to hand over

1. Money. What is in the account, what is still owed, what was spent by category this season, and where the receipts are.
2. Sponsors. Who gave what, the named contact, how you reached them, what you promised, and when to ask again. This is the record that most often walks out of the door. See keeping a sponsor.
3. Inventory. What the team owns and where it is. Without this, next year buys a second one of everything and cannot find the first.
4. Knowledge. The strategy reasoning, what broke and why, the design decisions, the code and how to build it, the passwords-and-procedures for anything fiddly.
5. Calendar and admin. Registration deadlines, event dates, school forms, the insurance paperwork, and who to ask about each.

Train replacements before they are needed

A document does not replace a person. From about January, every critical job should have a younger member shadowing it: someone who has actually deployed the code, actually filed a reimbursement, actually emailed a sponsor.

The test is simple and worth running in April: have the understudy do the job for a week while the senior sits on their hands. Whatever breaks is what your handover document is missing. The role list is where to start assigning understudies.

What next year should be able to answer on day one

• How much money do we have, and what is committed?
• Who sponsored us, and who talks to them now?
• What do we already own, and where is it?
• What did we decide about last season's robot, and what did we learn at each event?
• Which events do we enter and when do we register?
• Who has access to the accounts?

Make it a system, not an act of heroism

Every one of the answers above is a byproduct of ordinary work. If the budget, sponsors, inventory and documentation live in a shared system used during the season, the handover is a login rather than a project. If they live in one laptop and one person's memory, the handover is a reconstruction, and it happens every single year.

That is the actual argument for keeping records: not tidiness, but that the team still exists in three years. It is also, not coincidentally, the sustainability section judges ask about. See the portfolio guide. The toolkit is built around this, and a graduating member being removed should not take anything with them.