The Handover Note That Saves A Week When Someone Resigns

Someone resigns on a Tuesday. You ask them for a handover note. What comes back is a list of folders, a few logins and a link to a shared drive. Three weeks later their replacement is stuck on something that was obvious to the person who left.

A handover note that actually saves time is built around unfinished decisions and people to call, not files. Files are findable. What walks out of the door is the reasoning: why a thing was done that way, what was tried and rejected, and which supplier answers their phone. Write that down while the person is still willing to help you, which is the first week after they resign, not the last.

Why file lists fail

A list of documents assumes the hard part is finding things. It almost never is.

The hard part is that half of the work in progress is mid decision. There is a question hanging with a client. There is a design choice that was made for a reason nobody wrote down. There is a vendor who is slow unless you copy in a particular person. None of that lives in a folder.

The replacement does not know what they do not know. So they either redo work that was already settled, or they make the opposite decision to the one their predecessor made, and nobody notices for a month. That gap is most of the cost of one person holding the knowledge.

The four sections that matter

Keep the note to a few pages. Four sections, in this order.

• Open decisions. Every question that is currently unanswered. What the question is, who has to answer it, what the leaving person would have done and why. This is the most valuable section and the one most people skip.
• Decisions already made that look strange. Anything where an outsider would reasonably ask "why is it like this?". One line each. The point is to stop somebody undoing it by accident.
• People to call. Names, what they help with, and any quirk worth knowing, like the person who never replies to email but always answers a message. Include internal people, not just external ones.
• What is about to happen. Anything with a date in the next quarter: a renewal, a review, a seasonal spike, a payment. Things that will surprise the new owner because they are not in any active task.

Then, and only then, a short list of where things live. The same four sections work when you are handing a finished project to the client's own team.

Write it in the first week, not the last

Notice periods have a rhythm. In week one the person who resigned still feels invested and slightly guilty. By the last week they have mentally left and are answering questions in single words.

So book the handover writing early. An hour on day two or three gets you more than a day at the end.

It also gives you time to test the note. Give it to whoever will pick up the work and let them ask questions while the author is still there. Every question they ask is a gap in the note, and it can be filled in an afternoon rather than reconstructed in a month.

Make it a live document, not a leaving gift

The best version of this is that you do not write a handover note at all, because the information was already being kept as the work happened. Rotating ownership gets you most of the way there, since a second person has already had to learn the work.

That is easier when open decisions are items on the same board as the tasks, and when the people involved in a piece of work are recorded against it rather than remembered. A team using SicherOne has project records and HR records on one set of data, so the question "what was this person carrying" is something the system can answer rather than something a manager reconstructs from memory. Whatever tool you use, the principle is the same: if a decision only exists in a chat thread, it will not survive a resignation.

A short interview if you are short on time

If the person is already halfway out and you get one hour, do not ask them to write. Sit with them and ask these, recording the answers:

• What is currently undecided, and what would you do?
• What would somebody new get wrong in their first month?
• Who do you call when something breaks, for each kind of breaking?
• What is coming up that is not on any list?
• What have you been meaning to fix and never got to?

Type it up straight after. A rough transcript of those five answers beats a tidy document about folder structure every time.