Credential lifecycle

Access authority is borrowed, not owned. Every grant should have a name, a reason, an approver and an end date. Credential lifecycle work is the discipline of keeping those four facts true as people join, move, travel and leave.

The four states of a grant

We describe authority in four states, because most confusion comes from treating them as one.

• Issued. Authority created against a signed brief, with an owner and an expiry date recorded at the moment of creation.
• Active. Authority in use, reviewed on a fixed cycle, unchanged since the last review or changed with a note explaining why.
• Suspended. Authority deliberately paused — a longer absence, a dispute, an investigation — with a date on which the pause will be re-examined.
• Retired. Authority withdrawn and recorded as withdrawn, so that a later review can prove the withdrawal happened.

Joining

Onboarding follows the intake brief. The manager confirms the role, governance confirms the scope, and the grant is created with a default end date — ninety days for contractors, longer for staff, always a date. A grant without an end date is not a smaller risk than one with; it is a larger one, because nothing will ever prompt a second look.

Moving and travelling

People change roles more often than they change employers. A move should subtract authority as deliberately as it adds. We keep a short register that shows the delta: what was held before the move, what is held after, who approved the difference. For people who travel, we separate authority from location, so that a change of city does not become a change of rights.

Leaving

Departure is where written arrangements earn their keep. We prepare a closing note for each person: the grants withdrawn, the sessions closed, the records that remain, and a signature from someone in the client's organisation confirming the work. The note takes minutes to produce when the register is current, and days when it is not — which is exactly why we keep it current.

Review in practice

Each quarter we circulate the register to owners with a single question: keep, change or remove. Silence counts as remove. That sentence does more for hygiene than any amount of documentation, because it puts the default on the side of less authority rather than more. Owners answer in minutes because the entries are short and written in their own vocabulary.

Records

The register, the briefs and the closing notes live in the client's own document store. Quarterly reviews produce a one-page summary that a governance owner can place in front of a board without editing. We retain only correspondence; the history belongs to the client.