The sinking feeling when you realise just how much you relied on your old software supplier.
Often it’s not until you’re transitioning away from your current supplier that you discover everything you didn’t know they did. What seemed like straightforward software development suddenly reveals itself as a complex web of integrations, workarounds, and undocumented business logic that only they understand.
You see, when a supplier takes on someone else’s code, it pretty much goes like this:
Week 1: “Where’s the documentation for this integration?”
Week 3: “Why does this field contain LinkedIn URLs when it’s labelled ‘Fax Number’?”
Week 6: “Who can explain why this workaround exists?”
Week 12: “We’re going to rebuild this module because we can’t figure out the business logic.”
From our experience taking over projects from both inshore and offshore suppliers, we’ve seen this pattern repeat countless times. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
The real cost of poor transitions.
The hidden costs of messy supplier transitions compound in ways most businesses don’t anticipate. There’s the obvious knowledge reconstruction time: your new supplier spending weeks or months trying to understand systems and integrations that could have been explained in a meeting.
But it goes deeper than that. Business disruption follows when systems fail or behave unexpectedly because nobody understood the subtle dependencies. The opportunity cost mounts as teams focus on understanding existing systems rather than delivering new features.
Risk escalates because security vulnerabilities and compliance issues hide in code that nobody fully comprehends.
Then come the surprises: expensive third-party licensing requirements that weren’t documented, or critical infrastructure knowledge that only the departing supplier understood.
The collaborative transition: Your best investment.
The solution is simpler than most people think, but it requires swallowing your pride and involving your previous supplier in the handover process.
When your previous supplier participates in the transition, everything changes. Design decisions that would take months to reverse-engineer get explained in hours. Integration quirks that would be discovered through painful trial and error get documented upfront.
The transition timeline shrinks dramatically because hidden dependencies surface early, not after they break in production.
“The ‘expensive’ collaborative transition is actually the cheapest option.”
The alternative is paying your new supplier to spend months reconstructing what the previous supplier could explain in a single meeting.
The offshore challenge: When scale creates continuity issues.
Collaborative transitions face structural challenges when you’re moving away from large-scale offshore suppliers. In large offshore firms, high staff turnover and rotating teams create continuity gaps. These operations can struggle with personalised client relationships due to their scale.
This creates a knowledge gap that even collaborative handovers struggle to bridge.
When you transition from a large offshore supplier, you’re often dealing with a complete change of personnel who have no connection to your original project.
The offshore supplier may be willing to help with the handover, but if the original developers are gone, their ability to explain the “why” behind decisions becomes severely limited. Without robust knowledge transfer processes, you’ll face sluggish team velocity and significant project delays, regardless of how collaborative the transition attempts to be.
Planning for success.
Smart transitions require three key elements: phased approaches, comprehensive documentation, and infrastructure ownership.
Phasing the transition
When your previous supplier managed multiple systems, the temptation is to move everything at once. This maximises risk. A phased approach:
- Maintains system continuity during transition
- Allows lessons learnt from early phases to improve later ones
- Provides fallback options when issues arise
- Reduces business disruption and maintains stakeholder confidence
Capturing tribal knowledge
Documentation during handovers must capture “tribal knowledge”: the accumulated understanding that comes from working with a system over time but was never formally documented. This doesn’t just help new suppliers; it reduces downtime, prevents compliance surprises, and gives executives confidence that critical knowledge won’t walk out the door.
The objective is to capture as much of the following as possible:
- Real-time documentation of explanations during handover sessions
- Screen recordings of system demonstrations and workflows
- Detailed architecture diagrams and data flow maps
- Decision logs explaining why certain approaches were chosen
- Complete inventory of third-party dependencies, licensing terms, and cost implications
- Infrastructure configuration documentation covering server setups and deployment scripts
Working towards infrastructure ownership
Find a way to own and control the source code repository and CI/CD pipeline. In some agreements, ownership may be tied to staged payments or milestones, but working out a fair solution early pays dividends.
If you don’t already have a DevOps platform, discuss with your supplier how to set one up under your control that they can work within throughout the project. If you already have an established platform like Azure DevOps or similar, explore whether they can work with that from the start.
When structured properly, this approach delivers immediate business value: faster supplier onboarding, complete visibility of project dependencies, and elimination of handover delays that typically stretch timelines by months.
Building transition rights into contracts.
The smartest businesses build transition support into their supplier contracts from the beginning. Even lightweight clauses can make a substantial difference to your transition experience.
Essential transition clauses
Consider including specific requirements for transition assistance:
- Minimum transition period: 30–60 days of overlap, with costs covered at the supplier’s transition support rates
- Knowledge transfer obligations: documented handover procedures and training sessions
- Documentation maintenance: up-to-date system documentation maintained throughout the project
- Personnel availability: reasonable efforts to make key team members available during transition periods where possible
- Cooperation requirements: explicit obligation to work constructively with successor suppliers
Making it practical for SMEs
You don’t need complex legal frameworks. A simple clause that recognises the value of transition support can transform your switching experience. For example:
The supplier will provide transition support services for a minimum of 30 days, charged at the supplier’s prevailing transition support rates.
The key is making transition assistance a contractual obligation with fair compensation, not a favour.
Reducing vendor lock-in (because you can’t eliminate it).
Lock-in is inevitable to some degree. The pragmatic goal is to limit its impact and reduce switching costs through smart planning.
Building transition-ready systems
In an ideal world, you’d build systems designed for easy transitions from day one. This involves modular architecture, comprehensive logging, well-documented APIs, and standardised technologies that avoid proprietary tools.
Perfect transition-ready systems come with a premium that many SMEs won’t see immediate value in paying. Instead, focus on the basics that deliver immediate value: keep an inventory of commercial libraries, avoid exotic tech choices, and document key integrations that would be painful to rebuild.
The goal isn’t perfection – it’s reducing the switching cost to a manageable level rather than creating a transition nightmare that locks you in through sheer complexity.
Maintaining internal knowledge
Don’t outsource all knowledge to your suppliers, but be realistic about what’s practical for your organisation. Most businesses outsource development precisely because they lack internal technical expertise.
Focus on what you can actually do:
- Keep your own notes from meetings and discussions with suppliers
- Record the business reasons behind major technical decisions (“why did we choose this approach?”)
- Document your business processes separately from technical documentation
- Understand what your systems do from a business perspective, not how they work technically
- Know your data and compliance requirements
The goal isn’t to become technical experts – it’s to avoid being completely dependent on your supplier’s memory when they leave.
The strategic advantage.
Companies that master collaborative transitions gain competitive advantages that extend far beyond individual projects.
Strategic flexibility means complete freedom to change development suppliers based on merit, not dependency. You gain negotiation strength in all supplier relationships and the ability to competitively tender technical services without transition barriers.
Operational benefits include faster time-to-value when onboarding new suppliers, cost predictability with accurate estimates from the start, and reduced risk because you’re dealing with known quantities rather than hidden surprises
This approach also demonstrates appropriate technical risk management to auditors and regulators.
Stronger supplier relationships emerge when you remove adversarial elements from transitions. Suppliers appreciate collaborative clients and often provide better service and pricing in return.
The bottom line.
Your new supplier will thank you for involving your current supplier in the handover, and your budget will definitely thank you. Collaborative transitions cost less, take less time, and carry far less risk than adversarial ones.
Every business changes suppliers eventually. The only question is whether you’ll handle it as a structured, low-risk transition – or as a chaotic, budget-breaking scramble.
Nathan Green – Founder
Dedicated to inspiring passion and purpose through innovative software solutions, empowering businesses and individuals to overcome challenges and reach their fullest potential.
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