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The Handover Kit

Everything you need to sit down with someone who is leaving, find out how their job actually works, and write it down so their successor can use it. For the leaver’s manager, or whoever will absorb the work.

Four stepsAbout six hours of your timeOver three weeks
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Step 01

Is an extensive handover session recommended for this role?

All roles are different, and treating them all the same is how the important ones end up with the same forty-minute handover as the trivial ones.

Gate
Would anyone outside their team notice within a month if this role went unfilled? If the honest answer is no, stop here. Unique knowledge that moves nothing is not worth six hours.

Risk score, 0 to 10

How much of the role is genuinely written down?
Not “is there a folder”. Could a stranger work from it?
How long have they held this role?
Time in seat is the best single proxy for undocumented knowledge.
How many tasks can only they do?
Things that would stall on Monday if they did not come in. If you cannot name them, nobody has mapped them yet. Treat that as several.
Do they personally hold outside relationships?
Clients, suppliers, regulators.
Is there a named successor, and will they overlap?
An overlap is the cheapest knowledge transfer there is.

Time until they leave

How long until they actually leave?
This decides the shape of the plan.
–Not scored
Answer the five questions above, then say how long you have.
You will get a plan, and the sections of the interview worth running.
Step 02

Book it properly, or it will not happen

The most common failure is not a bad handover interview. It is an interview scheduled into the final week, when the person has mentally left and the calendar is full of goodbyes.

01
Start when they hand in their notice, not at the leaving date.
02
Three sessions of forty-five minutes, not one long block.People remember things between handover sessions. Some of the best material arrives at the start of session two.
03
Last session at least a week before they leave.
04
Successor in the room for process and history. Not for people and judgment.Successors ask more relevant follow-up questions than most managers. But the leaver will not speak freely about colleagues with the successor in the room, because the successor has to work with those colleagues next month. Keep the Relational and Judgment sessions one-on-one.
If the departure is not their choice. The session is still worth asking for, and the knowledge risk is usually higher because the exit is abrupt. The framing changes: it may belong in the settlement or garden-leave conversation rather than a friendly email, and the last line of the template below comes out.

The email that books it

Written for three handover sessions. It rewrites itself once you have scored above.

It clarifies the intent, bounds the time honestly, asks about the recording instead of announcing it, and says exactly who will read the result.

Before you record anything. In the EU, recording an employee is personal data processing under the GDPR. You need a lawful basis and a stated retention period. If you have a works council or other employee representatives, check whether a recurring practice like this needs their approval. Outside the EU, check the equivalent local rules. Agree it once as a policy rather than once per person. Tell the leaver what happens to the recording and delete it once the document is written.
Step 03

Start the manual handover session

Forty-two questions in six sections, built around the four kinds of knowledge that leave with a person. You will not get through all of them, and you are not meant to. Your risk score picks the sections. Type straight into the boxes, or print the page and write in them.

01
Record it if you can. Do not take notes.Note-taking means you are writing instead of listening, and the follow-up question is worth more than the note. If you cannot record, bring a second person to take notes so the interviewer only listens.
02
Chase every “obviously” and every “it depends”.Both mark knowledge the person no longer experiences as knowledge. “Obviously you would check the batch number first” is something not obvious to anyone else, and they will not repeat it unprompted. “It depends” is the beginning of an answer, never the end of one.
03
Ask what went wrong, not just what to do.People volunteer the procedure and withhold the failures. A competent successor can work out the procedure. They cannot work out which shortcut cost someone three weeks in 2024.
Risk scoreRun these sections
0 – 3Opening and Closing. One conversation is enough.
4 – 6Opening, Relational, Judgment, Closing. Add Procedural only if you scored above zero on the first question.
7 – 10All six sections, across three handover sessions.
Under 3 weeksJudgment and Relational only, whatever the score. Everything else can be reconstructed.

Opening · Mapping the role

Start wide. These calibrate everything after them, and they are easy to answer, which matters for getting the conversation moving.

Q 1–5
1
2
3
4
5

Procedural · How the work actually happens

The gap between the documented process and the real one is where most of the value in this session sits.

Q 6–15
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15

Relational · Who to call

The org chart tells you who is supposed to approve things. This section tells you who actually does.

Q 16–23
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

Judgment · The expensive part

These need the most patience and produce the most value. Expect “it depends” and follow it every time.

Q 24–34
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34

Context · Why things are the way they are

Without this section the successor spends their first year re-proposing ideas that were rejected for good reasons.

Q 35–39
35
36
37
38
39

Closing · Gaps and priorities

Ask these at the end of the final session, when they have had time to think between meetings.

Q 40–42
40
41
42
Step 04

Turn the answers into something usable

This is the half that gets skipped, and it gets skipped because nobody owns it. So: the interviewer writes it, the successor reads it, the leaver checks it. If those are three different people, name them in the booking email.

The output is not a transcript. It is a document organised the way the successor will need it, by situation rather than by the order the conversation happened in.

The eight-section role document

1
What this role ownsThe three-sentence version, then the list of things that stop if nobody does them.
Q 1–5
2
The recurring calendarDaily, weekly, monthly, annual. Include the deadlines that live only in the leaver’s head.
Q 2, 11
3
The processes that matterUsually three to six. Step by step, in the real sequence rather than the documented one. Note where they differ.
Q 6–15
4
The people mapWho to call for what. Mark who actually approves things, and which relationships need a warm introduction.
Q 16–23
5
Judgment calls and their conditionsEach recurring decision, and what it actually depends on. Takes longest, worth the most.
Q 24–34
6
Known failure modesWhat goes wrong, the early warning signs, the standard fix. Write them as “if you see X, do Y”.
Q 13, 26, 29, 41
7
History and settled argumentsWhy things are the way they are, and what has already been tried and rejected. Saves a year.
Q 35–39
8
First week, first monthWho to meet, what to read, what not to change yet. Write this last. End it with a date to revisit the whole document after ninety days.
Q 22, 40, 42
Example: one line from section five Whether to accept a rush order: yes if the line is under eighty percent load that week. Otherwise call Marloes before promising a date. That is the shape of every entry in sections five and six. If X, then Y, otherwise ask Z.
01
Write it within a week of the last session.While you can still remember which answers mattered. The transcript will not tell you.
02
Anything that will not fit the eight sections goes in an appendix.A handover document that runs to forty pages is a handover document nobody reads.
03
Send the draft back to the leaver before they go.They will correct three things and add two they forgot. Fifteen minutes, and the highest-value quarter hour in the process.
04
It lives with the role’s other documentation, linked from the onboarding.Never in the leaver’s inbox, never in the interviewer’s downloads folder. If the successor has to ask where it is, it does not exist.
If you only do one thing. Sections 5 and 6, judgment calls and failure modes, are the ones a competent successor genuinely cannot reconstruct alone. Everything else they can piece together from the systems and the people around them. If time runs out, write those two properly and let the rest be bullet points.
Rinto

Rinto asks the follow-up questions for you.

The 42 questions in this kit get you started. The useful answers usually come from the next question: the example, the exception, the name of the person to call. Rinto asks those questions and keeps everything in one safe place.

  • Follow-up questions on every answerRinto listens to each answer. When an answer is vague, it asks for the example, the exception or the person to call.
  • Starts from the documents you haveUpload process documents and old handover notes. Rinto asks about the parts they leave out.
  • A role document and an onboarding planOrganised the way this kit organises it, so the successor has it on day one.
  • Stored safely and easy to findEverything is kept online on servers in the EU. The manager, the successor and HR open it in the browser, each with their own access.