Handovers, More Than A Procedure For Vacations #

Changes within an organization are inevitable. People join and leave, take short or a long break, move up or down the ranks. All these movements change the way the individuals, teams and the organization as a whole function. It alters the internal workflow and the way information flows.

This presents two challenges for the impacted teams. First, you have a gap in knowledge that can, and should, be covered by the internal documentation in the best case scenario and at worst can be gained more slowly by doing the work hands on.

Second, and more critical, is the gap in the way work happens and information flows. As these happen to evolve informally over time, there is no documentation and in many cases no procedures because, let’s be honest, the sheer amount of information to cover everything you do would make that documentation unusable.

Handovers are a great way to deal with these two situations. It closes the knowledge gaps by making people review and update existing documentation for their projects, makes visible all responsibilities by making people write down a list of their commitments, recurring things that they do and the kind of decisions they make on a regular basis, and formalizes all informal workflows by making a list of people that regularly contact them and who they contact for a given topic.

I have seen too many instances of people tasked with doing a handover and they write documentation for what they know about the products and features they work on and call it the day. Although a good starting point, that knowledge should already be available in the internal documentation.

The end result should be a clear and concise one or two pages that provide all the information required to start operating in your absence that cover the things. Reviewing your own handovers is a great way to spot workflows inefficiencies and responsibilities that shouldn’t be yours that informally accumulate over time in order to improve the way you operate.

What seems odd, is how few times the handover procedure is used for other instances when there is a structural change for other reasons other than leaving for vacation. For example when there is a big project you have to focus on and have to let others do some of your current work, of a job position change.

Still having access to the person is no excuse for not doing a proper handover. It helps reduce interruptions providing a major productivity boost to the person delegating their work and clarity to the newly appointed person. A mandatory step when delegating any kind of responsibility to another person.

Make writing a handover a recurring practice that you and the people in your team do to improve the way you operate as a whole.