How to Hand Over a Research Programme When Someone Leaves

Your head of research resigned on Friday. Can you answer these on Monday without calling them: What studies are in progress? What stakeholders are waiting? What did the programme learn last year? Where does all past research live?

Preparing Before It Is Needed

Checkpoint: For each of these, does it exist right now in accessible form: study history, active studies, brief backlog, cross-study syntheses, stakeholder map, methodological templates, repository structure, tool access?

Checkpoint: How many of those eight items are documented and accessible? Count honestly.

When Someone Leaves Without Warning

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

Checkpoint: Attempt to reconstruct the last twelve months from documentation alone. How much can you recover?

What Good Looks Like

If the most knowledgeable person were unavailable for a month, would the programme function? Would a replacement get up to speed from documentation alone? That is the test.