The agreement
The Handover That Uses the Gap
An offset can work as a second shift, but only if the end of each day is written down for the start of the other, and most of the value is in two lines.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent less
Two hours of overlap a day
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent more
Seven hours of overlap a day, and the same weekend as ours
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two quotations were compared on price, lead time and references. The right-hand column was in neither comparison and was worth more than the eleven per cent.
Before moving another call into somebody's evening, it helps to see the reporting options and check how the work is actually distributed across projects and days.
A useful independent source for this part of the workflow is Apache Software Foundation.
Two pairs of lines: the same work, with an end-of-day handover and without one
Five queries sent as they arose, no handover note
11 / 7Four of the eleven days were not working days on their side: each query crossed the offset on its own. About two hours of work spread over eleven days
The same five items, sent as one end-of-day handover
3 / 3All three days of this wait were working days on their side. Answered in the first hour of their day, all five together
A problem found on the floor at 10:00 their time, with no standing authority
2 / 2Both days of this wait were working days on their side. A machine standing for most of a shift
The same problem, with standing authority for tolerances in range
1 / 1The one day of this wait was a working day on their side. Decided on the floor, reported in the handover, confirmed the next morning
four waits · 17 calendar days · 13 of them working days on the other side
The gap did not change between these pairs and neither did the work. What changed was whether the end of one day was written down for the start of the other. One team's own job.
An eight-hour offset can work as a relay: work handed over at the end of one day is picked up at the start of the other's, and something progresses while each side sleeps.
That only happens if the handover exists. Without it the same offset produces one round trip per day and nothing else.
What a handover is not
It is not a status report. A status report is written for somebody who wants to know how things are going, and it is read by a manager.
A handover is written for the person who is about to pick the work up, and its test is whether they can proceed without asking anything.
The two look similar and contain almost entirely different material.
The shape
Four lines, sent at the end of each working day, whether or not anything happened.
Thursday close, Hamburg. Done: drawings 14 and 15 issued; the galvaniser is booked for the 19th. For you: the tolerance question is answered — 0.5 mm is accepted, go ahead on that basis. Blocked: nothing on our side. If you hit anything: anything inside the stated tolerances, decide it and tell us. Anything that moves a date, hold it and we will answer in your morning.
The last line is the one that converts the gap from a delay into a shift. Without it, every unexpected thing waits nine hours.
Standing authority is the other half
A handover without a decision rule produces a polite queue of questions that still takes a day each.
The rule does not have to be elaborate. A short list, agreed once, of what the other side may decide alone: tolerances within a stated range, equivalent substitutions, re-sequencing that does not move a date. Everything else is held and asked.
Thirty minutes at the start of a job, and it removes most of the waiting for the rest of it.
Who writes it
Whoever is actually doing the work, not their manager.
A handover written by somebody who was not on the floor contains status and not detail, and the detail is the whole point. It takes the person doing the work about four minutes, which is less time than they currently spend writing individual messages during the day.
What it replaces
| Without a handover | With one |
|---|---|
| Questions sent as they occur, one round trip each | One batch, answered together |
| Problems held until somebody is awake | Decided within the agreed range |
| A status call to find out where things are | Already written down |
| Nobody sure what the other side did yesterday | A dated record |
The last row has a second use. Six weeks later, when there is a disagreement about when something was decided, the handovers are a contemporaneous record written by the person who was there, which is the most useful kind of evidence there is.
Where it fails
Two ways, both predictable.
It becomes a status report, because a manager starts reading it and the writer begins writing for them. The remedy is to keep it addressed to the person on the other end by name.
Or it stops when things get busy, which is when it is most valuable. A handover that is sent on quiet days and skipped on difficult ones is worse than none, because the other side learns that its absence means nothing in particular.
The honest limit
This works for a pair of parties with a continuing flow of work between them. It does not scale to four parties, and it does not work where the other side's work is not continuous.
Where it does apply, it is the single arrangement in this collection that turns the offset from a cost into something useful, and it costs four minutes a day.
Starting one without an agreement
A handover does not need the other party's consent to begin, and beginning unilaterally is usually how the good ones start.
Send yours at the end of each day for a fortnight, addressed to the person on the other end, whether or not anything comes back. Most of the time something comes back within a week, because the format is obviously useful and reciprocating it is easy.
Where nothing comes back, yours is still worth sending: it removes the morning exchange in which they ask what happened yesterday, and it puts a dated record in the thread.
What does not work is proposing it as a process and waiting for agreement. That turns four minutes a day into a decision somebody has to take, and decisions of that size take weeks to get taken.