Every agency has a version of this story.

A project runs over. A client is unhappy. A deadline gets missed. The debrief happens, and somewhere in the conversation, a name comes up. The AM who didn't pass the brief across properly. The PM who assumed someone else had picked it up. The designer who built to the wrong version because nobody told them it had changed.

The instinct is to look at people.

But here's what I see consistently, across agencies of every size: the work almost never breaks within someone's role. It breaks between roles. In the handover. In the gap.

The gap nobody owns

Every project has moments where it moves from one person to another. Brief to creative. Creative to production. Account to delivery. Delivery to client.

These moments feel like non-events. They're not a task on anyone's list. Nobody's measured on them. They happen in a Slack message, a forwarded email, a five-minute conversation before someone heads into another meeting.

And that's exactly why they're where things go wrong.

When a project runs over, trace it back far enough and you'll almost always find a handover where something wasn't transferred. Not through carelessness; because the person passing it across assumed the person receiving it already had what they needed. And the person receiving it assumed that if something was missing, they'd have been told.

Both of them were paying attention. The gap between them wasn't.

Why agencies don't see it

Handover failures are genuinely hard to diagnose from inside the system.

By the time a project is overrunning, or a client is unhappy, or a team member is frustrated, the sequence of events has compressed. What happened three weeks ago in a brief handover doesn't feel obviously connected to the conversation you're having now.

So the debrief focuses on the outcome. Who missed what. Where it went wrong at the end. And the corrective action tends to target the person closest to the problem rather than the point in the process where it started.

This is how agencies end up with teams who are genuinely capable but repeatedly in firefighting mode. The problem isn't their ability. It's a gap in the operating model they're working inside.

What handovers look like when they work

Clear handovers aren't complicated. But they do need to be deliberate.

The basics are usually the same:

• The receiving person confirms they have what they need - not just that they've received it, but that what's been passed across is complete enough to work with
• Assumptions are surfaced, not carried - if the brief is unclear on something, that gets flagged at the point of handover, not discovered two weeks in
• Ownership is explicit - there's a named person responsible for the next stage, not a group chat or a shared folder
• The handover is traceable - someone can look back and see what was agreed, what was shared, and what the next step was

None of this requires a new tool or a major process overhaul. It requires making visible something that currently happens invisibly.

Try this

Think about a project that ran into difficulty in the last six months. Not a catastrophic failure, just one that was harder than it should have been.

Where did it start to go wrong?

If the answer involves a moment where something moved from one person to another, and what arrived wasn't quite what the other person needed, you've found your handover gap.

The good news is that once you can see it, it's fixable.

If you're not sure where your handover gaps are, a Visibility Session is designed to find them. Not a long engagement, not a report that sits in a drawer - an honest look at how work moves through your agency and where the gaps are. Book a Visibility Session today.

Latest posts in our blog