---
name: plan-a-business-unit-carve-out
category: start
description: Plan a business unit carve-out across scope, people, contracts, assets, data, systems, controls, finance, customers, transition services, cutover, and separation proof. Use when a unit must operate independently after a divestiture or reorganization.
---
# plan-a-business-unit-carve-out
## When to use
- Use for divestitures, spinouts, joint ventures, regional separation, or internal legal-entity restructuring.
- Do not move data, people, contracts, or licenses merely because they are convenient to copy.
## Procedure
1. Define the perimeter, effective dates, buyer or receiving model, jurisdictions, decision rights, confidentiality, and success measures.
2. Inventory people, roles, customers, suppliers, contracts, assets, IP, records, data, applications, infrastructure, identities, and controls.
3. Resolve shared, stranded, excluded, duplicated, licensed, consent-bound, and locally regulated items with accountable owners.
4. Design target operations, legal entities, financial opening balances, governance, controls, service levels, and access.
5. Specify transition services with scope, dependencies, pricing, security, change, exit criteria, and extension authority.
6. Rehearse data and system separation, cutover, communications, customer continuity, reconciliation, rollback, and Day 1 support.
7. Track post-close disentanglement, residual access, stranded cost, TSA exit, records, obligations, and independent acceptance.
## Failure plan
- Hold the affected separation wave when legal authority, data boundaries, operational continuity, opening balances, or rollback are unproven.
## Worked example
A software unit separates customer contracts and code while shared identity, billing, support, and cloud agreements continue under time-boxed services.
## Done
- A carve-out plan records perimeter, people, assets, contracts, data, systems, controls, finance, services, cutover, and disentanglement
- Legal, operational, security, financial, customer, cutover, rollback, and post-close acceptance evidence verifies separation