Handover

A complete handover is a short list and every item is checkable: accounts and administrative rights transferred to company-owned identities; the source code in a repository the company controls; the domain and DNS in the company's registrar account; documentation sufficient for a competent third party to continue; the credentials in the company's password manager; and a named contact for the period after.

Written into the engagement at the start, it costs nothing. Requested at the end it becomes a negotiation, and requested after a disagreement it becomes leverage.

Accepting delivery instead of transfer

A launched site is not a handover. If the repository, the domain and the analytics remain under the vendor's account, the company has bought the use of an asset rather than the asset — and will pay again for the next change, or pay a great deal more to rebuild.

A definition sits still. This does not.

The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.

From a brief to work somebody has accepted

A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier. 6 steps, acceptance by demonstration is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.

Somebody will quote this number at you.

Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.

Writing a specification you can accept work against

“Here is the brief. Redesign the site, improve the funnel, modernise the stack.” · 60 minutes, 5 questions.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

Your product has a meaning. You are too close to say it

The name is not the work. The invariant is the work, and the name is what it compresses to.

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M&A audit and deal review

Price the system you are buying, not the one in the data room.

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Platform and transactional architecture

The domain model is the product. Everything above it is an interface to it.

Digital asset register

A written list of every account, domain and system the business depends on, recording who owns it, who administers it, what it costs and how it is recovered.

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Vendor selection and total cost

Judging a supplier on what the work costs over its life — including the rebuild — rather than on the quotation.

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Key-person risk

The number of people whose sudden absence would stop something important — and in most small companies the answer for the digital estate is one.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.