Good hand-offs are an important part of the work. After all, the hard work you’ve done has to get turned into reality. Here are some great things to consider when planning for a successful hand-off.
Hand-offs of your work can be to many groups, such as those listed below. They may be responsible for:
- Commercialization
- Going-to-Market
- Delivery
- Socialization
- Internal Adoption
In order for these groups to have the best chance of success with using what you have done, there are some good practices to have around hand-offs, such the following:
- Provide a summary of insights.
- Couple insights with recommendations.
- Provide the results and insights from any testing conducted on the work.
- Include as much documentation as possible or practical when delivering artifacts.
Digging Deeper
Great hand-offs are important to successful work. They can often be a source of frustration between design and engineering teams, for instance. When design documentation is not complete, development teams can have a much harder time understanding the intent of the design. Additionally, when documentation is not provided for why a decision was made, or what insights are behind the decision, a design may be challenged, and sometimes this leads to changes that don’t reflect the insights and findings uncovered during the overall design process. That can lead to a much more difficult road – defending a design after the fact is much harder than presenting rationale up-front.
