The Handover

How many times has a project been handed over to your organisation on time, approved and celebrated — and not finished? Most people in operations stop counting during their first year.

The meeting happens on schedule regardless. The chart is green, the signatures are collected, and the project team is already half gone: new assignments, new badges, a farewell cake in the canteen. Out on the line the picture is a different one. Test series are still running on the machine that ships next week. The work instructions are a folder nobody has opened. Half the operators were trained on a version that has since been rebuilt, and the ones who know the process are the ones leaving. None of it is on the agenda. From that morning all of it belongs to operations.

Nobody has been careless. A project is paid to finish, and the date it was handed does not move; what gives instead is completeness. What stays open has no line in the final report, so it quietly stops existing. And approval is a milestone in a plan, not a state of an operation: a step that passed qualification has passed a test, which is not the same thing as holding rate through a night shift with the crew that owns it.

So the gap transfers, and it lands on the shift that was not in the room. It surfaces one stoppage at a time, usually in front of the customer, and by then it has other names: teething problems, a difficult ramp, an operation that cannot hold its numbers. At a site I took over, serial production had started before the product was finished, and the first months went on finding, one by one, the open items the signature had closed.

One question tells you whether a handover is real: where is the list of what is not finished, and can both sides read it out loud in the same room? It is usually a short list, and usually the one nobody has written. Without it the project has not finished. It has only signed.

Where this shows up: Prototype → serial production — getting from a working product to a process that holds.