Transition Cliff
Governance, knowledge, and commercial authority dissolve at project boundaries.
Governance, knowledge, and commercial authority dissolve at project boundaries — go-live, handover, team change. The receiving side inherits liability without capability.
Recognition signals
- The BAU team inherits a vendor contract with no contract expertise. They're now responsible for managing variations, enforcing SLAs, and negotiating renewals — but nobody briefed them on the contract terms.
- Post-project disputes arise with no governance structure to handle them. The steering committee disbanded, the PM moved on, and the escalation path disappeared.
- A key person leaves and commercial knowledge walks out the door. The contract understanding, the vendor relationship history, the informal agreements — all stored in one person's head.
- Legal counsel wasn't briefed on the engagement until something broke. The legal team inherits a dispute about a contract they've never read in a context they don't understand.
- "We'll sort that out in BAU" is repeated during project delivery. Every time this phrase appears, it's a transition risk being deferred rather than managed.
Structural cause
Why this happens
Projects are designed to end. Governance is designed for the project phase. Nobody designs the governance for what comes after. The transition is treated as an event — a handover meeting — not a process that takes months of capability transfer.
The cliff is sharpest at the intersection of commercial and operational responsibility. The project team understood the contract because they negotiated it. The BAU team inherits the contract without the context. Every assumption, every informal agreement, every 'understanding' between the PM and the vendor — all of it disappears at the boundary.
The structural fix isn't documentation. Documentation captures information, but it doesn't transfer judgement. The BAU team needs supervised exposure to live vendor interactions, commercial decisions, and governance dynamics before the project team leaves.
Risk mapping
| Risk | Description |
|---|---|
| V7 | Transition gap — governance dissolves at project-BAU boundary |
| CO3 | BAU inherits liability — operational team inherits contract obligations without capability |
| CO4 | Readiness gap — receiving team not assessed for capability before handover |
| K5 | Key person risk — critical knowledge concentrated in one person |
Self-assessment
When to worry
- Your BAU team will inherit the vendor contract but hasn't met the vendor's commercial team
- The transition plan is a document handover, not a supervised capability transfer
- Key person risk hasn't been assessed for governance and commercial knowledge
- "We'll sort that out in BAU" appears in meeting notes more than twice
When you're OK
- BAU team has been co-managing vendor interactions for at least two months before handover
- Legal counsel was briefed within the first month of the engagement
- Transition readiness was assessed six months before planned handover
Related reading
- The contract management gap — the commercial capability gap that Transition Cliff exposes
- Leverage Erosion — the BAU trap: liability without enforcement tools
- Information Fog — knowledge doesn't transfer because it was never captured
Transition readiness should be assessed six months before handover, not six days.
A programme health check identifies where commercial knowledge, governance authority, and operational capability will dissolve at the boundary. 10fifteen — programme health checks.