An operations leader I worked with transitioned out after years of doing the job well. His team handled the daily and weekly data exchanges in a business that operated with large-scale data movement, and he focused on strategic projects and supported the operation here and there.
When he left, his team thought they were prepared. They had transitioned every operation and task that had procedures, which was most of them because he was task-conscious and detail-oriented. The transition was planned and executed over a series of weeks. Logs, playbooks, tickets, and alerts were categorized and handled.
The handoff missed one category of work: the “support the operation here and there” tasks. Without those steps, files fail checks they used to pass, and the exceptions folder fills up. The team realized that he had done a lot of preventive work to make things run without the delays caused by errors. To him, it was part of the task, not something separate to mention. To the team, this was a list of tasks that didn’t get transferred to a new owner… because it was not written down.
This is a work design problem.
Records are written for failures
We usually expect that an employee handoff involving records like the logs and playbooks is complete. The system in place outlines the work that’s done. We see the flows for exceptions and errors and they are working. What this team didn’t see was the work that prevented the error path from being taken. The better the preventive work was, the less there was recorded.
The records showed every path an error could take and none of the steps that kept errors from happening.
Handoffs don’t include habits
The expected fix is to more completely hand off the work. Habits don’t show up in handoffs. The leader had a habit of cleaning certain data files he knew were problematic. He flushed the exceptions folder regularly so that new exceptions that arose were clearly visible and not lost in months’ worth of exception files.
In order for the next person in the role to learn the habits, they have to experience the same problems and slowly build these up, one incident at a time.
Write the reason when you document the step
Contributors: If you take steps to make things run smoothly, document these. Otherwise, this part of the work is invisible and won’t be picked up by the next person who owns your job. When you document the step, also say why you do it and what failure it prevents. Indicate what a person would see if the step wasn’t taken. This makes the prevention visible to someone who hasn’t watched you do it.
Leaders: Smooth-running processes you don’t worry about may be those with hidden tasks. Pick your best running process and ask yourself whether steps or tasks “just happen” because you have tenured professionals carrying the work.
Work that goes right leaves no record.
If you want to know which of your work has no record, the diagnostic takes about 10 minutes: https://amykennedyleadership.com/choose-your-diagnostic/