Succession and Endings

Managing Research Software Projects

Greg Wilson

2026

Learning Objectives

  • Assess your project’s lottery factor and identify single points of failure.
  • Write a one-page advance directive for your project.
  • Begin a succession plan for your own role.

The Lottery Factor

  • How many people have to be unavailable in order for the project to halt?
  • Most research projects have a lottery factor of one for most functions.
  • Most leads do not find out until the person leaves.

Preparing for Transitions

  • Preparing for a transition means making project health independent of individuals.
    • Grant cycles give succession planning a natural calendar.
  • Minimum version for an ongoing project has three parts:
    • A shared credentials document.
    • A release checklist.
    • An advance directive.

If It Happens

  • Don’t announce shutdown immediately.
  • Instead, announce that you are stopping work and invite people you know to take over.
    • Only people you know because of the risk of supply chain attacks.
  • If no one is willing to take over, try to give users 2-6 months.
  • Broadcast on all available channels.
  • Tell people why, and what will happen to the project’s assets.

Lottery Factor Audit (10 min)

Answer these questions for your project:

  1. Who can create a release?
  2. Which credentials exist only on someone’s personal account rather than a shared project account?
  3. What would your project be unable to do if you were unavailable for three months?
  4. What would be unrecoverable if a key team member left without any notice?

Write Your Advance Directive (10 min)

Write a one-page document covering:

  • The conditions under which this project should be wound down (not just “when funding runs out” but specific observable signals: contributor count, response time to issues, number of active users).
  • Who has the authority to make that call.
  • What assets must be preserved before shutdown is complete.
  • What obligations must be honored before the project can be considered closed.

Give the document to an LLM and prompt it to identify three realistic scenarios it doesn’t cover.