In one sentence
A handoff is the point where responsibility for the work passes from one person or system to another.
The simple model
Work rarely stays in one place. It moves: from a customer to an inbox, from one person to a colleague, from a spreadsheet to an ERP, from an automated step to a human check.
Each of those moments is a handoff. Two things have to be true for a handoff to work: the right information has to travel, and the receiver has to know it is their turn.
Why you care
Handoffs are where delay, lost context and duplicate work concentrate. The step before the handoff and the step after it are usually fine. The gap between them is where a request sits for two days because nobody knew it had arrived.
When you design a digital or AI workflow, the handoffs are often more important than the steps. An AI that finishes its part instantly still helps nobody if the result lands somewhere no one is watching.
What makes a handoff reliable
- The information passed is complete enough for the next step.
- The receiver is notified, or the item appears in a place they check.
- It is clear that the item is ready, not still in progress.
- If the receiver is unavailable, the item does not vanish.
A small example
A sales rep marks a deal as "won" and expects onboarding to begin. Onboarding only checks the system on Fridays. The handoff exists on paper but not in practice, so new customers wait up to a week for no reason.
Making the handoff a real event, a notification or a shared queue, removes the delay without changing either team's actual work.
What this does not solve
A clean handoff does not fix a slow or overloaded receiver. If the next step is a bottleneck, a faster handoff just makes the queue longer. That is a capacity question, not a handoff question.
