Adventures in Project Management

It gets very emotional in the closing stages of an initiative, when the team who has lived and breathed the transformation has to let go of it and hand over to business as usual teams.  The BAU teams sometimes can't wait to take on some of the activities and sometimes don't want to at all.  Either way, handing over work, accepting it is not yours to worry about anymore as the BAU team does it a different way, or in some cases messes it up entirely is really hard.

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This certificate is a bit of a gimmick, but it highlights the emotional concerns of both the programme and BAU teams, and signing it in a mini ceremony is a good way of formalising handover and giving permission for people to acknowledge their emotions.

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Rather than handover the entire programme to BAU in one go, try handing over elements of it as they reach your required threshold of maturity, and/or the drive starts coming from the business.  This helps get everyone into the programme is closing frame of mind and shapes the programme team's thinking that progress is now measured by successful handover of the functions it has built - rather than continuing to build and run ever better functions.

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