Handoff
The moment work passes from one person to another — the most common place for it to stall, and the least measured.
A handoff is the point where a piece of work leaves one person and becomes another person's responsibility. It sounds like a non-event, and it is where most delay in a small organisation actually lives.
The reason is that a handoff has no owner by definition. While work is with someone, they are accountable for it; in the gap between two people it belongs to nobody, and nobody's inbox generates urgency. Measure a project honestly and you routinely find that of fifteen elapsed days, six were spent in transit — not being done badly, just not being done.
Three things close the gap: a named receiver rather than a team, a stated definition of what "ready to hand over" means, and an acknowledgement. The acknowledgement matters most and costs least. Work sent into silence is work whose status nobody knows, and the sender usually finds out four days later.
Worked: a five-stage process where each handoff averages 1.2 days of dead time carries roughly 5 days of pure transit in a 15-day project. Requiring a same-day acknowledgement and naming the receiver takes it to 0.4 days each — the project finishes in 11 days with nobody working faster.
Also known as
- handover
- work transfer
Relevant for
- Founders
- Work in transit belongs to nobody, so nothing pushes it — name the receiver and require an acknowledgement, and you will find days you did not know you were losing.
- Business owners
- Measure the dead time between stages, not the stages; most late projects are not slow work, they are work sitting between two people.