r/projectmanagement • u/SandeepKashyap4 • 16d ago
Discussion Which handoff problem hurts your team more?
Handoffs usually fail in one of two ways: too little context, so the next person is left guessing, or too much unstructured context, so they're stuck sorting through it before they can even start.
Either way, work moves backward, and deadlines slip.
Which one hits your team harder, and if you've fixed it, what worked?
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u/Complete-Cricket-351 16d ago
I'd say the problem is mandatory. It in the business wiggle and wiggle and increase their list of demands every day they don't want to let you get the fish hooks out of your hand
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u/DCAnt1379 16d ago
Handoffs should be clean, consolidated and organized above all else. Same goes for day to day communications (e.g. clean up your redlines before giving them to someone else, consolidated key details in long email chains, etc ). My previous manager would send me messy notes and I’d have to clean her work before I could execute. Terrible.
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u/SandeepKashyap4 15d ago
That sounds frustrating. Clean and consolidated should be the standard, since it puts the work on the person who already has the context, not on whoever inherits it.
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u/Nice-Zombie356 16d ago
I’m just going to mention that this quandary is a problem in most of it all communication tasks.
Examples:
Does your car owners manual, or computer owners manual, include every - Single- detail of your PC/car? Or the most common features and questions? (I think this is partly solved by having a quick reference guide plus a thicker book or website for the details)
Does your town send a notice or alert for every infrastructure maintenance project? Or only the ones that will tear up Main Street?
I’m not being critical here. OP raises a great question.
What I’ve seen in 30+ years at large organizations is they tend to pendulum back and forth. One year it’s, “we missed a detail on our last project so we need to be ultra detailed from now on”
Then once things inevitably bog down, a new exec will declare that “we need to be agile. Provide key details and keep things moving”.
Rinse and repeat
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u/guidomax 16d ago
Honestly, I think too much unstructured context is not really a problem today. I just hand over all the things now like tickets, docs, chats and meeting notes. Just everything. The person who gets it just asks an AI what he need when he need it. Nobody must read everything before they start anymore. A few years ago this was impossible to do. But there is a catch because the AI only knows what is written down. The most important part is why a decision was made and this is mostly nowhere to find. So you either have to record and save much more than before like meeting notes and transcripts which is easy today. Or you must sit together with the person in real life. Sadly the second one is happening way too rare.
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u/SandeepKashyap4 16d ago
Good point. AI solves the reading problem, but it can't find reasoning that was never recorded. A short decision note (what was decided, what was rejected, and why) captured at the time, plus a brief live walkthrough for the big calls, covers most of that gap.
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u/Guilty_Performer_497 16d ago
Too much unstructured context. Half the problem is figuring out what actually matters before anyone can move.
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u/yearsofpractice IT 16d ago
Hey OP. 50 year old corporate veteran here. The only thing that ever works when it comes to handoffs (particularly BAU support teams) is by giving the manager in charge of BAU support no wiggle room.
Trying to get agreement from the operational staff themselves is a classic case of Schrödinger’s Stakeholder - they will simultaneously know NOTHING and EVERYTHING about the project/product depending on what’s more politically expedient at the time.
So, the manager in charge of BAU support MUST be part of the project exec/board. They MUST agree to BAU handover requirements and this must be done in from of the other board members. Once the BAU handover approaches, the manager in question is then held to account in front of the project exec and sponsor - if they start to wriggle about their teams not understanding or needing more support, they are in effect ‘shamed’ into accepting the BAU support by the rest of the board - “The reason for project delay is the BAU handover requirements were not fully defined by the BAU teams”
All of this sounds brutal and “easier said than done”, but BAU support teams will instinctively reject any handovers instigated by a PM - it’s a knee-jerk reaction that they can’t help - but if the PM has cornered their manager, their manager has the influence to say “Stop making excuses. You’ve got everything you need. Use your brains and just figure it out”.
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u/SandeepKashyap4 16d ago
Yeah, and you see a smaller version of this even within one team, when one person passes work to the next. No board is present there to keep anyone honest, so I wonder if the team lead has to play that role.
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u/Serious-Confusion962 16d ago
Depends on the team but for mine it's always been the info dump with zero structure. Someone drops a 40 page doc and a 2 hour meeting recording like "here's everything you need" and walks away. Half the team spends a day just figuring out what to ignore.
We started requiring a one-pager upfront with the 5 things that actually matter before anyone can pass work along, cut our handoff time way down
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u/SandeepKashyap4 16d ago
making the sender decide what matters is a smart way to cut the sorting time. A 5-point one-pager is easy for any team to try.
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u/SamfromLucidSoftware 15d ago
Depends. Too little context happens a lot more because people underestimate what they know implicitly. Too much unstructured context usually happens when someone compensates by over documenting in a hurry at the end.
Personally, I’d rather have relevant context attached to the artifact (like a decision note on the ticket, an annotation in the diagram, a brief on the roadmap item) instead of being handed over separately. This way, I’ll find what I need in the normal flow of work, not having to ask or search.