Handoff
A handoff is the moment work moves from one person, team or tool to the next, along with what the next person needs to act on it. In a service business, handoffs sit between sales and delivery, between a request and whoever does it, and between tools. That's where work waits and details get lost.
Why it matters
While work stays with one person, it moves fast. Each time it changes hands, two things can go wrong: it waits until the next person notices it, and some of the context stays behind with the last person. Neither shows up on a timesheet, so the cost is easy to miss. I call it the handoff tax: the time work spends waiting between people, plus the rework when something said on a call never got written down.
An example
Take a web agency. On a sales call, the client explains that their launch date can't move because of a trade show. That detail lives in the sales lead's notes. The project manager gets a deal summary with the scope and the budget, plans the work on a normal schedule, and only finds out about the trade show when the client asks why the dates don't line up.
How a system handles it
A system turns each handoff into a short set of fields that has to be filled before the work moves on: what was promised, by when, who decides and what's still open. The next person gets a notice with that record attached the moment the work is theirs, and anything left unclaimed past a set time goes back to whoever handed it over. People still talk to each other, and the details stop depending on anyone's memory.
Questions
How do I find the handoffs that cost me the most?
Follow one recent project from first inquiry to final invoice and write down every time it changed hands. Then mark where it waited longest and where someone had to ask the same question twice. Those marks tend to cluster at the same few points.
Should I remove handoffs altogether?
Some of them. A step that only passes work along can often go. The rest stay, because different people do different parts of the work, so the aim is for each remaining handoff to carry its context with it.
Related
- BottleneckA bottleneck is the one stage that limits how much your whole business can move. The Theory of Constraints in plain words, with an example and the fix.
- Closed-won to kickoffClosed-won to kickoff is the gap between a client signing and the project starting. What has to happen in it, where it breaks, and how a system runs it.
- Should I hire an operations coordinator or install a system?What an operations coordinator costs a year, set against installing a system: where each one fails, and which to pick first when your agency is growing.