Hand off first, then document.

I know this sounds backwards. If you have a small business and want to hand off work to someone on your team, don’t document first. Start with the transition. Have them shadow you and write the steps themselves before they take the lead.

Let me explain.

My first company was big enough that we each had an 8-digit employee number. I used mine often enough that I still remember it over 20 years after I first used it. 

There were more than 120,000 employees worldwide when I started. Large enough that there were times when I felt interchangeable with my many colleagues. Many of my early projects were large business and systems integration projects. These had many teams building separate parts that had to connect and work as if one person built them. A big part of our job was to make the handoffs happen smoothly and as easily as possible. Large teams have a lot of handoffs, and handoffs are where things tend to go wrong. The data between systems doesn’t work together. A team improves their work and unknowingly disrupts another team’s. Sometimes one team’s task works as expected on its own, but how it connects with the next team throws an error. The purpose of integration testing was to find these trouble spots.

Within the first few weeks of joining the company, we all completed the same project fundamentals training. We learned where to find the templates, so we didn’t have to start from scratch. We learned the same process and a shared language to communicate with each other about what we were working on. The organized documentation meant that we could get up to speed quickly by reading first instead of asking. 

What does this have to do with a small business and with current technology advances? Today it’s easy to record what you are doing and generate pages of documentation while you work on the next thing. We’ve all seen the advice to write standard operating procedures (SOPs) for repeatable tasks and to save time by recording them while you’re doing the work. I have written and used many of these step-by-step instructions in the past, and love a good write-up. However, as I was reading yet another long how-to guide while stuck on the “add user” step in the instructions I was following with no number to call to ask for help, I had a different thought about all the documentation.

Small businesses have a different problem from large corporations. They often start with one or two founders, who do everything at first. As the business grows, things become more complex. At some point, even after prioritizing and optimizing, there is still too much for one or two people to do. If you already have someone to hand work to, start with the handoff and document along the way. Don’t document first. Documenting first assumes you already know which tasks you explain the same way every time and which ones need judgment. I often think something is repeatable only to find out later that judgment is needed too.

Next time you have something to hand off, try this instead:

1. Create 1 shared place where the best version of your work can live. Any shared drive or folder works, and you probably already have one.
2. Pick what you want to hand off.
3. Add an example you’d want someone to follow. Also templates and checklists you already use. If you don’t have any, that’s fine. Start with the empty folder.
4. Have them shadow you the next time you do the work. Walk them through it out loud.
5. Then have the person taking it over, write it down in simple steps and save it to that shared location.
6. Next time, have them take the lead and follow what they wrote. Shadow them if you want.
7. Review two things: the work itself and the steps they wrote.

If they were able to complete the work by following the steps they wrote, success!

If questions came back to you or you feel the need to redo part of the work, walk them through what you changed and the reason for the changes. Have them update their steps and try again next time. If this happens twice on the same task, it probably needs judgment. Decide together where they can use their own judgment, and write that into the steps.

Then pick the next thing. Repeat this for more and more of what’s on your plate, and you will get time back for whatever you actually want to do with it.