Time Off Handover Has Entered Review
The person leaves for vacation in four days. The handover document has been open for two weeks and contains one bullet.
Classification Notice Re: Time Off Handover Document, Status Update Issued August 15, 2022
Document Status: In Review (Since August 1)
The time off handover document was created on August 1, 2022. At the time of creation, vacation was fourteen days away. The document was opened, titled, and populated with one bullet point describing a recurring meeting that requires coverage.
At the time of this notice, vacation is four days away. The document contains one bullet point.
What the Document Should Contain
A complete handover document for this person's role should include: coverage assignments for three recurring meetings, context on two active projects that are mid-cycle, outstanding items awaiting decisions from external stakeholders, known issues in the current deployment that are being monitored but not yet addressed, the location of the documentation that explains the thing only this person currently knows how to do, and a note for the colleague who has agreed to cover urgent matters explaining what counts as urgent.
The document contains one bullet point.
Vacation begins Thursday.
Why There Is One Bullet
The person opened the document on August 1 and wrote the first bullet because it was easy to write. The first bullet is the straightforward coverage assignment. The first bullet required no judgment.
The remaining items require judgment. The remaining items require describing ongoing situations in terms that a person without full context can act on, which requires first identifying what full context is, which requires thinking about the work at a level of remove the person has not been able to achieve while inside the work.
The handover document is a record of everything the person knows and has not yet transferred to anyone who might need to know it, which is most things.
Consequence 1: The Three-Day Sprint
The document will be written in the three days before departure. Some of it will be written in the final two hours before departure. Some of it will be written at the airport. The quality of the airport portion will reflect the context in which it was written.
Consequence 2: The Coverage Gap
A colleague has agreed to cover urgent matters. The colleague has not been briefed on what constitutes an urgent matter in this context because the briefing was to occur alongside the handover document. The colleague is currently operating without the briefing.
Consequence 3: The Thing That Will Come Up
Something will come up during the vacation that the handover did not address. This is a predictable consequence of incomplete documentation. It is not foreseeable in the specific, only in the general.
The Absurd Rule
Handover documentation cannot be completed early because early completion requires predicting which aspects of ongoing work will require coverage, and this cannot be fully known until the moment of departure approaches, at which point the urgency of departure makes thorough documentation more difficult.
The best time to have written this document was August 1. The second best time is now.
Current Status
The person has opened the document. It has been open for eleven minutes. There are now four bullets. Progress is occurring.
Vacation is Thursday.