Written Handover — Minimum Requirements for Role Transition Documents

This document specifies requirements for written handover in professional and quasi-professional written communication.

It applies to written handover documents produced at role transition.

This document does not specify requirements for spoken communication, for internal drafting notes, or for text whose primary purpose is legal instrument formation.

The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document.

For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document applies.

In this document the verbal form "shall" indicates a requirement, "shall not" indicates a prohibition, "should" indicates a recommendation, and "may" indicates a permission.

Terms and definitions given in SQLBL 1000 and the following apply.

3.1 handover document — written record transferring the context required to assume accountability for work

3.2 accountability transfer — point at which the receiving party becomes answerable for the work

Professional communication is evaluated by the receiving party under conditions of limited attention and limited context. Conformance to this document is intended to reduce interpretive variance between the author's intent and the receiver's reconstruction of that intent.

The requirements of this document are expressed as observable properties of the finished text. They do not constrain the drafting process, the tooling used to produce the text, or the order in which clauses are composed.

Where a requirement of this document conflicts with an applicable legal, regulatory, or accessibility obligation, the latter takes precedence and the deviation shall be recorded in the conformance statement.

5.1 A handover document shall identify the outgoing and incoming accountable parties and the transfer date.

5.2 The document shall list active commitments with their dates.

5.3 The document shall record known risks that have not been mitigated.

5.4 The document shall identify the parties who must be informed of the transfer.

5.5 A handover document shall not be the sole record of any commitment.

A document conforms to SQLBL 1205:2026 where every requirement expressed with the verbal form "shall" in Clause 5 is satisfied and no requirement expressed as "shall not" is violated.

Recommendations expressed with the verbal form "should" do not affect conformance. Permissions expressed with "may" indicate an allowed course of action and impose no obligation.

Conformance claims shall take the form: "This document conforms to SQLBL 1205:2026, Edition 1." Partial conformance shall be declared by clause number, for example "conforms to SQLBL 1205:2026 Clauses 5.1 and 5.2 only."

Conformance may be assessed manually or by an automated checker. Where an automated checker is used, the assessment record shall identify the checker and the catalog release of SQLBL-1205 against which it was run.

Handover documents are read once, under time pressure. Length is a defect rather than a virtue.

Commitments recorded only in a handover document are routinely lost at the second transition.

Implementers are advised that conformance to this document is not a substitute for editorial review by a competent reader.

EXAMPLE 1 — Conforming. Transfer date 2026-08-03. Active commitments: vendor renewal (2026-09-01), audit response (2026-08-21). Unmitigated risk: single-operator dependency on the settlement job.

EXAMPLE 1 — Non-conforming. Everything is in reasonable shape; ask me if anything comes up after I leave.

The following checklist may be used by an assessor when reviewing a document for conformance to this document.