Keep active, retiring and archived services distinct

What this means for your practice

Give live, retiring and archived services clear meanings and owners. Complete the relevant content, link, information and connected-service checks before declaring an item retired.

How to review the arrangement

Mark a fictional site for retirement and trace links, content, records and connected services. Who decides when the work is complete? The register should record the effective date and unresolved dependencies. Changing a status label is the final record of a decision, not a substitute for carrying it out.

Make each status describe the remaining work

Define what your register means by active, being replaced and retired. A service marked for retirement may still need to handle old links, preserve approved records or support a temporary handover. Those tasks should remain visible until the responsible owner confirms the agreed work is complete.

Follow a fictional information site through the process. Ask who approves retirement, which pages or printed materials link to it and what visitors should see afterwards. Include any connection or record held outside the site itself. A change in the register should reflect the actual state, not make unfinished work disappear. Keep the decision and effective date understandable to a covering colleague. Review a sample of supposedly retired services to see whether they remain live or promoted elsewhere. Where the status is wrong, correct the underlying work or the record with the responsible team, rather than assuming a label has completed the retirement.

How to check the result

Check whether each recorded service status matches what is actually available, being withdrawn or retained as history.