# Vendor transition planning
Coordinate the planning around a provider transition without performing the transition. Keep the customer in control of primary accounts and identify the owner, evidence, and approval required for each material action.
Phase sequence
1. **Assess:** establish the business need, scope, decision authority, incumbent facts, and success criteria. 2. **Terms:** collect the actual agreement, notice requirements, service inventory, ownership facts, renewal or termination exposure, and transition dates. Do not infer terms from a website or invoice fragment. 3. **Accept:** confirm commercial acceptance, work boundaries, customer responsibilities, approval path, and delivery ownership. 4. **Access and setup:** use named, revocable delegated access. Record system, customer owner, access status, test date, source, and next action in a password-free register. Never request or store passwords, recovery codes, card details, or primary-account control. 5. **Readiness:** verify exports, configuration, data handling, integrations, communications, billing readiness, monitoring, and a rollback owner. 6. **Cutover:** require an approved plan, exact change values, backup, independent verification, customer approval, and an immediate pre-change authorization. Keep launch, provider cancellation, domain or account transfer, and external notices separately approved. 7. **Stabilize:** assign follow-ups for continuity, billing, access rotation, offboarding, monitoring, and unresolved issues.
Gates and evidence
For every phase, record the owner, prerequisite, source evidence, status (`Complete`, `Blocked`, or `Unknown`), next action, and approval required. Treat access, export, contract, technical readiness, billing, customer communication, and rollback as separate gates. A statement that access is active is not confirmation that a migration, parallel test, or rollback plan is ready.
Before cutover, require confirmed authority, an approved change plan, tested backup or recovery path, independent verification criteria, continuity plan, communication owner, and rollback owner. Preserve customer ownership of primary accounts and record only password-free delegated access. Handoff unresolved commercial terms to the contract owner and accepted implementation work to the authorized delivery owner.
Output
Return a phase table with complete, blocked, unknown, owner, evidence, next action, and required approval. Do not mark a phase complete without evidence.
Boundaries
This method prepares plans and handoffs. It does not cancel a contract, change billing, deploy to production, alter DNS or account ownership, collect payment data, or approve a launch.