Valeo · security governance / June 2026
The handover test: does the process still work when I am not there to explain it?
At the end of several months of governance work, one of the strongest quality checks was whether someone else could follow the register and reporting process without an oral walkthrough.
Situation
Long projects accumulate a great deal of context in the head of the person doing the work. An abbreviated column name, a special status or a rule that 'we always handle this this way' starts to feel obvious. Handover reveals how much of that knowledge is implicit. If every step still requires a personal explanation, the system is not actually finished.
Approach
I tested the documentation as a task path: where does a new person start, how do they find the source of truth, how do they update an item, and how do they produce management status from it? Wherever progress depended on verbal explanation, I went back to the model and made either the rule or the documentation clearer.
Outcome
The governance layer became less dependent on a single person. The objective was not a hundred-page description of every edge case, but a normal workflow that explained itself and exceptions that could be found in a known place.