The short version
- Put the open questions at the top, not the bottom. They are the only section that decides whether the next person can start.
- Most handover templates are organised by the leaver's responsibilities. Organise by what the next person will hit first instead.
- Copy the template below. Five sections, and the first one is the shortest.
- A document cannot carry current state for long. Say when it was last true, and expect it to go stale within weeks.
Search for a handover template and you will find a dozen that all start the same way: role summary, responsibilities, key contacts, systems and passwords, ongoing projects. It looks thorough. It is also ordered exactly backwards for the person who has to use it.
The template
Copy this as it stands. It fits on two pages and takes about ninety minutes to fill properly.
| Section | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| 1. Open questions | Things I do not know the answer to, and who might. Each with what happens if it stays unanswered. |
| 2. Live things and where they stand | One block per live piece of work: current state, next action, named person waiting on it, date this was true. |
| 3. Decisions and why | What was decided, the alternative, and why the alternative lost. This is the section that prevents repeats. |
| 4. People | Who to ask for what, internal and external, with any history worth knowing before the first conversation. |
| 5. Routine and access | Recurring obligations with their dates, and what accounts exist. The dullest section and the easiest to write. |
Why open questions go first
Everything else in a handover is settled. The questions are what is not settled, and unsettled things are what stall.
There is a second reason, which is psychological. Handover documents are usually written to look competent. Listing what you do not know cuts against that instinct, so the section either gets left out or gets buried under "notes". Putting it first makes it impossible to skip, and it sets the tone: this is a document about what is unresolved, not a record of a job well done.
Write each one so it can be acted on. Not "pricing for the German account is unclear", but "the German account was quoted at the old rate in July and I never confirmed whether we are honouring it for renewal. Ask Nadia. If nobody decides before 1 November it renews at the old rate automatically."
How to fill each section
Open questions. Look for anything you have been putting off. Procrastination is an excellent detector of unresolved things.
Live things. One block each, and keep it to five lines. The date matters more than people think, because the reader needs to know whether they are looking at something three days old or three weeks old.
Decisions. Do not write every decision. Write the ones where the obvious option was rejected, because those are the ones the next person will otherwise walk straight back into. There is a format in the decision log template.
People. Include the small things: this client prefers a call to an email, this supplier ignores the shared address. That is the part no system holds.
Routine and access. Write it last. It is the easiest section and it will otherwise eat the time the first three sections needed.
What a document cannot carry
Section two goes stale fastest. The state of live work changes weekly, and a handover document is a photograph. Four weeks after it is written, most of section two is wrong in some small way, and small wrongness is worse than absence because people act on it.
That is not an argument against writing it. It is an argument for knowing what it is for: the first two weeks, not the first two quarters.
For the ongoing version, the record has to be updated by the work rather than by an event. This is what StandIn is built for. Each day, a person spends about ninety seconds on a brief: what moved, what is open, what is blocked, what is next, mostly drafted from the work that already happened. When they are unavailable, their StandIn answers from that brief, in their words, with a source under every answer. It never guesses, and when the answer is not in the record it says so and names who to ask. A team doing that does not face a blank page when someone leaves, because sections one and two have been written continuously all year. See how teams use it.
Common Questions
How long should a handover document be?
Two pages for most roles. Beyond that it stops being read and starts being filed. If your role genuinely needs more, the extra belongs in the systems people already use, not in the handover.
Who should write it, the leaver or the successor?
Best results come from the successor drafting it from conversations and the leaver correcting. The person who does not yet understand something is much better at noticing the gap. More on that in knowledge transfer when an employee leaves.
Is this the same as a vacation handover?
Close. A vacation handover can drop sections three and five, because the person is coming back and nothing needs re deciding. Sections one and two carry the whole load. See handing off work before vacation.
Should we keep old handover documents?
Keep section three. Decisions and their reasoning stay useful for years. The rest can go, because it describes a state of the world that no longer exists.
90 seconds, then it's on.
Engineers publish a brief before they log off. The next timezone starts with full context, not a reconstruction of what happened while they slept.