How to Hand Over an Experimentation Programme When Someone Leaves

Your programme lead resigned on Friday. On Monday, you need to answer these questions: What experiments are currently live? What decisions are pending? Which stakeholders expect updates this week? What was learned from the last ten experiments? Which ideas in the backlog have already been tested? What are the programme's current quarterly objectives? Can you answer all of these without calling the person who just left?

The Ideal: Preparing Before It Is Needed

Checkpoint: For each item in the list below, ask yourself: does this exist right now, in a form that someone other than the current programme lead could access and use without explanation? The list: experiment history, decision log, business objectives and alignment, workflow and governance documentation, stakeholder map, prioritisation framework, tag taxonomy, active experiments and pipeline, templates and playbooks, integration details.

Checkpoint: How many of those ten items are fully documented and accessible in your programme right now? Count honestly.

Schedule three to five structured handover sessions covering purpose and positioning, current state, relationships, how things actually work, and what did not work.

Checkpoint: Which parts of your programme would stop working or degrade significantly if a specific individual left? Name them. Each one is a single point of failure.

The Reality: When Someone Leaves Without Warning

Week one: stabilise. Find active experiments. Audit documentation. Inform stakeholders. Secure access.

Checkpoint: Can you produce a list of active experiments right now without asking anyone?

Weeks two to four: reconstruct. Interview the team. Search for documentation. Rebuild experiment history.

Checkpoint: Try this exercise now. Without asking anyone, attempt to reconstruct the last twelve months of experiments. How much of the picture can you recover from documentation alone?

Month two onward: rebuild. Formalise what was informal. Accept the knowledge loss.

What Good Looks Like

A programme that handles departures well is one where the loss of any single person does not result in significant knowledge loss.

Checkpoint: Answer that question right now. If the honest answer is 'less than half', this is a live risk.