Handover checklist: Leave work without worrying + email templates

Once upon a time I used to try to plan my projects around dates when I knew I was going to be in the office. My colleagues joked that I planned the birth date of my first child around a major transformation project go live date (I didn’t).

Once upon a time I used to try to plan my projects around dates when I knew I was going to be in the office. My colleagues joked that I planned the birth date of my first child around a major transformation project go live date (I didn’t).

As experienced project managers know, when things change on a project, all your carefully planned deadlines switch around too.

In this article, we’ll look at how to plan and execute a handover to a colleague. Looking for specifics on how to write a handover email to your manager? I have a full article on that too, with templates, so be sure to check it out!

If your project is closing, read my guide to how to handover a project at closure instead.

At some point in your career, you are going to have to handover your project to someone else. That could happen for a number of reasons:

Someone moving to backfill a role elsewhere in the organization

In context

• Topic: Proyectos, PMO y Riesgos — Gestión de proyectos, oficinas de proyecto y riesgo del portafolio.
• Source: Rebel's Guide to PM
• Published: 22/08/2026

Continue reading at the original source →

Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.

Why it matters

Projects rarely fail on the day they are declared failed. They fail months earlier, in a meeting where somebody saw the problem coming and calculated it was not in their interest to say so. Everything else — the slipping schedule, the stretching budget — is the visible consequence of that silence.

My filter is the quality of the status report. If every project is green, the reporting system is not working: in any real portfolio some initiatives are in trouble, and a healthy organisation surfaces them in time rather than discovering them at the closure committee.

What usually goes wrong

What I see fail most is the absent sponsor. They sign the kick-off, appear in the photo, and do not come back until there is a problem. Without somebody with real authority clearing obstacles every fortnight, the project manager ends up negotiating as an equal with areas that do not report to them, and loses.

What to watch

• Who the sponsor is and how often they actually show up — not on the org chart, in the calendar.
• Whether the status report shows any red projects: an all-green portfolio is a portfolio without information.
• Which risks are identified, who owns each one, and when they were last reviewed.

How I read this entry

If this landed on my desk, the first thing I would ask for is not percentage complete: it is the list of pending decisions with a name and a date. A percentage can be dressed up; a decision stuck for three weeks with an identified owner cannot be argued with, and it explains the delay far better.

This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.