Every project ends. The question is whether it ends in a way that leaves the client genuinely able to own what was built — or whether it creates a new kind of dependency.
We think about handover from the beginning of a project, not the end. The decisions made during the build — how things are documented, how the code is structured, how knowledge is shared — determine whether a handover is straightforward or painful. By the time you're in the last sprint, it's too late to make those decisions differently.
The most important thing we try to do throughout a project is make sure the client's team understands what was built and why. Not just the surface-level functionality, but the reasoning behind the structural decisions. Why is the data organised this way? Why does this service sit separately from that one? What are the parts of the system that are most likely to need attention as the business changes? That context doesn't live naturally in the code. It has to be deliberately transferred.
Documentation matters, but it's worth being honest about what documentation can and can't do. A README that explains how to run the system is useful. A document that explains the architectural decisions and their trade-offs is more useful. Neither replaces having a developer who can sit with the client team and walk through the system — answer questions that the documentation doesn't anticipate, explain the things that are obvious once you know them but opaque if you don't.
We also try to structure the final phase of a project so that the client's team is involved in testing and sign-off in a way that builds familiarity, not just approval. The best handovers are the ones where the client team has been close enough to the build that the transition feels less like receiving a delivery and more like taking over something they already partly know.