Application support transition checklist

https://techsupport-team.com/resources/application-support-transition-checklist/

1. Name the systems and owners

List each application, environment, integration and business workflow. Record the application owner, technical approver, current support provider and vendor contacts. Identify source-code ownership and licence restrictions. A transfer is incomplete when a critical dependency has no owner.

2. Record the current support workload

Export a redacted view of recent incidents, severity, arrival patterns, unresolved tickets and repeated causes. Record existing support hours and the work expected outside them. Keep customer records and credentials out of the initial brief.

3. Verify access and release controls

Use named accounts and agree the permissions required for diagnosis. Identify who can approve restarts, data changes, rollback and deployment. Confirm access to source, a test environment, logs and release history where those are required. Having an account is not permission for every production action.

4. Review recovery evidence

Locate backup policies, recent restore-test evidence, rollback instructions and emergency contacts. Record gaps and their owners. Do not transfer a recovery promise that the receiving team cannot test or control.

5. Capture knowledge while it is available

Document architecture, scheduled jobs, integration contracts, known failure modes and runbooks. Pair the receiving engineer with the current owner on representative work. Each runbook should name its prerequisites, safe actions, validation and escalation path.

6. Agree a readiness check

Choose a supervised incident or drill. Define the evidence needed to show that the receiving team can diagnose, act within approvals and hand over the result. Track each unresolved dependency instead of assuming the handover date closes it.

7. Transfer open work and remove old access

Give every open incident and backlog item a named owner. Confirm the next coverage window and escalation contact. When access is no longer needed, remove it through the agreed offboarding process and retain the records your policy requires.

Handover acceptance record

Table: Handover acceptance record

| Area | Evidence available | Gap or dependency | Owner | Acceptance date |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Applications | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Source and licences | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Environments | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Monitoring | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Incident queue | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Runbooks | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Backup/recovery | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Release approvals | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Vendor dependencies | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Coverage | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Open work | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |
| Offboarding | To complete | To complete | To complete | To complete |

Put the checklist to work

Review [application support](https://techsupport-team.com/services/application-support/), [how we work](https://techsupport-team.com/how-we-work/), [security](https://techsupport-team.com/security/), [escalation matrix](https://techsupport-team.com/templates/escalation-matrix/).

[Download this template as text](https://techsupport-team.com/downloads/application-support-transition-checklist.txt).