What a handoff really costs
The work between the work is where most of a week disappears.
Every time a piece of work moves from one person to another, something is lost: a few minutes of waiting, a detail that did not make it into the message, a task that sits in an inbox overnight. None of it looks expensive on its own. Added up, it is often the biggest cost a team never sees.
1. Waiting is work too
A request that takes five minutes to do can take two days to finish, because it waits for someone to notice it. The work itself was never the problem; the queue was.
2. Every copy is a chance to get it wrong
When the same information is typed into three tools by three people, it ends up three slightly different ways. Fixing that later takes longer than doing it once.
- Names spelled two ways in two systems
- Status updated in one place and not the other
- Notes that never reach the person who needs them
3. Count the handoffs, not the tasks
Pick one process and draw it as a line from start to finish. Mark every point where the work changes hands. Those points, not the tasks between them, are where an agent saves the most.
A team we worked with found eleven handoffs in their onboarding process. Their agent now covers seven of them, and new customers get set up the same day.
4. Start with the slowest one
Fix the handoff where work waits longest. It is rarely the most interesting one, and it is almost always the one people feel most.