Handover is treated as a completeness exercise. Documents are indexed, certificates are signed, keys change hands. The 2017 FIDIC forms strengthened what that requires: as-built records, operation and maintenance manuals and training moved out of the contractor’s-documents clauses into Sub-Clause 10.1, making their supply an express condition of taking over, with the Engineer required to issue a Notice of No-objection on the records and the manuals. A Defects Notification Period of one year, unless the contract says otherwise, then begins.
There appears to be a way past it. Victoria Tyson of Howard Kennedy reads the redrafted Sub-Clause 10.3 as allowing deemed taking over, where tests on completion have been interfered with, even without those documents. That is one practitioner’s reading rather than settled law, and it may never be tested. It is worth knowing before relying on the clause.
All of that is necessary and none of it is sufficient. A contract can compel the delivery of documents. It cannot compel the transfer of understanding, and understanding is what operations actually needs.
The gap is rarely anyone’s fault. It is structural: the party that holds the knowledge has no remaining obligation at precisely the moment the party that needs it arrives. Nobody is behaving badly. The incentives simply stop.
The discipline that addresses this has a name: operational readiness. In process industries it is mature and well resourced, because a plant that cannot be run on the day it is finished is obviously a failure. In building, property and civil infrastructure programmes it is applied inconsistently, and when it is applied it usually begins far too late to change what is being produced. Operational readiness run as a commissioning activity is a checklist. Run from inception, it is a specification.
