Where work stalls when it moves between people

Work stalls at handovers because every transfer loses information, and information is what a job actually runs on. Each time a job moves from the WhatsApp thread to the office manager to the technician, the brief gets thinner, the context disappears, and somebody has to ask a question that should already have been answered. The fix is a short written brief that travels with the job, and a named owner on each side of the transfer.

Where does work actually stall when it moves between people?

• The person who sold the job is not the person who delivers it, and the customer has been told to expect something that was never written down.
• The office retypes the enquiry into a job card, and the retyped version is thinner than the original message.
• A job moves from one technician to another mid-week, and the second one starts by phoning the customer to ask basic questions.
• A quote is accepted on the phone, but the acceptance is only in a chat thread nobody can find later.
• A part is ordered by someone who was told the wrong model number.
• The job is handed to the next person with a verbal briefing in a noisy vehicle.
• Nobody is the owner while it sits between the two people.

The pattern is consistent. The stall is never caused by the handover itself. It is caused by the gaps in the information, and by the moment when two people each assume the other one has it.

Why do handovers lose information?

Three reasons, and only one of them is a people problem.

• The brief lives in someone's head, and heads are not a system.
• The brief lives in a chat thread, where it is mixed in with forty other messages and cannot be searched or filtered.
• The brief is written down but does not say who does what next.

A written handover that ends with "let me know" is not a handover. It is a note with an extra sentence. The person receiving it still has to work out what they own, by when, and what happens if something is missing.

The test for any handover: could a competent person who has never seen this job start work from what is written, without phoning anyone?

What should a handover brief contain?

Keep it to one screen. If it needs two, the job is probably two jobs.

The last row is the one that does the work. A handover without a single named next action has not actually changed hands.

How many handovers should one job have?

Fewer than you think. Every handover adds risk, so the question is not just how to make handover better, but how to remove some of them.

• Sell, schedule and deliver in the same conversation wherever you can.
• If the office must re-key the job, make the re-key a copy of the original, not a summary.
• If two people must touch a job, decide in advance which one owns the customer relationship and which one owns delivery. Ambiguity here is the single most common cause of delay.
• Batch the handovers. Four jobs moving at 08:00 is far better than four jobs moving at nine different times through the day.
• If a job genuinely needs three people, accept it and budget for it, rather than pretending it needs one.

What does "no context" look like three days later?

It looks like a technician standing in a customer's driveway unable to answer a basic question about what they are there to do. Then it looks like a phone call to the office, then to the salesperson, then to the customer, then back to the office to find out what the salesperson actually promised.

By that point the job has lost the better part of an hour, and the customer has formed an impression about your competence that no apology recovers.

You can measure this without any software. Ask your team, once a month, how many times last month they had to phone someone to find out what a job was about. That number is your handover cost, expressed in the only unit that matters.

How do you hand over when you are in a hurry?

In a hurry, write less, not more. Four lines beat nothing, and a message sent while standing at the back of a bakkie takes ninety seconds.

JB-2214 — Mrs Naido, Unit 4, gate code 4821
Scope: geyser replacement, existing pipework stays
Booked Thu 9th, must be finished Fri 10th
Parts ordered by me, collect from the Durbanville branch
Next: Thabo to book the plumber for Thu before 10:00

Send it to the person receiving it, and do not delete it. If the handover lives only in a voice note, the person receiving it has to transcribe it under pressure, which is where the error enters.

How do you fix handovers without buying a new system?

You almost certainly do not need new software. You need the existing message thread turned into a record.

1. Give every job a reference number and use it everywhere, including in the chat.
2. Agree a fixed handover format and write it into a one-page note that lives with the team.
3. Make the next action mandatory. No action, no handover accepted.
4. Keep the handover and the job in the same place. A spreadsheet, a shared note, or a pinned message all work.
5. Review two handovers a week. Read them as if you were the person receiving them.

The purpose of the review is not to catch people out. It is to find out which parts of your format nobody is filling in, because that part is the one causing the delay.

What do re-explaining and reworking actually cost?

Put a number on it so the conversation stops being about principle.

Cost of handovers per month
= (jobs × handovers per job × minutes spent re-briefing ÷ 60) × hourly cost of the person doing it
  + jobs delayed past the promised date × average job value × gross margin %

Fill in your own numbers for a month. Most teams find the re-briefing time is the smaller half, and the delayed jobs are the larger one.

Where do you start this week?

1. Pick the handover that causes the most arguments, and write down what it should contain.
2. Give jobs reference numbers and use them in the chat from today.
3. Make "next action, owner, date" mandatory on every handover.
4. Ask the team how many times last month they had to phone to find out what a job was about.
5. Review two handovers a week, as the person receiving them.

If you would like someone to look at where your handovers leak before you redesign them, book a free strategy session with Agentcy.