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I need to create a handover document for a fairly large system consisting of all the stuff you'd expect from a telecom deployment: many servers, database clusters which copy some data between them in specific ways, tons of log files, both off-the-shelf and locally developed software, scripts, network configurations, local know-how, etc. It's really got as many sysadmin-typical elements, as development ones.

The target of this document are in the first place sysadmins who take over the day-to-day operation tasks and some problem resolving, and in the second place people who want to learn about the system in general.

Is there some place I can learn about how to write something like that? It could just as easily be a 10 page "what's where", as a 500 pages book about "all things telephony". Maybe it should be more than one document really.

Please link some useful resources / books I could use for this task.

PS: this is intended to be internal only, customer interactions etc. are out of scope here

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1 Answer 1

Check a format of the handover document given on the following link:


It very well explains the required content for such type of documents.

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Ah, I pretty much know what the boilerplate is... stakeholders, purposes, scope, etc. it's the whole section 11 called "Operational handover" that I'd like to learn about in much more details, but it's not given much attention in this doc. –  viraptor Jun 16 '10 at 11:15

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