Insights / Article / Process diagnostics and business process evaluation
ArticleControl gaps hide in handoffs
Many control failures occur not inside a step but between steps, where responsibility passes from one person, team or system to another. How to find and close those gaps.
When an organisation suffers a control failure, such as a duplicate payment, an order shipped to a customer on credit hold or a contract signed without approval, the investigation usually looks for the step where something went wrong. Often, it finds that every step worked as designed. The failure happened in between.
Many control failures occur not inside a step but between steps, where responsibility passes. One team assumes the next will check. The next assumes the previous one already did. Information is lost when data moves from one system to another. A change made upstream never reaches the people downstream. These gaps are rarely visible on process diagrams, which show boxes clearly and the arrows between them as simple lines.
Why handoffs are risky
Inside a step, one person or team is responsible, knows what they are doing and usually checks their own work. At a handoff, three things change at once: who is responsible, what information is available, and often which system holds the record. Each change creates room for error.
- Assumed checks: each side believes the other is verifying something, so nobody does.
- Lost information: details captured in one system or document do not carry across to the next.
- Timing gaps: work sits between teams with nobody accountable for it while it waits.
- Unannounced changes: an upstream team changes what it sends, and the downstream team does not notice.
Consider a typical sales and fulfilment process. Sales enters an order; the credit team checks the customer’s limit; the warehouse picks and ships. If the credit check happens in a separate system and the result is passed back by email, an order can be released to the warehouse before the reply arrives, or the warehouse may never learn that a customer was placed on hold after the order was entered. Each team did its job. The control failed at the handoff.
Find the handoffs
List every point where work changes hands or systems.
Start with a simple map of the process, from trigger to outcome, with one row for each team or system involved. Every time an arrow crosses from one row to another, that is a handoff. Include handoffs between systems, such as an export from one application loaded into another, and between people within the same team where responsibility changes.
- Draw the process at a level of detail that shows each team and system involved.
- Mark every point where work, data or responsibility moves from one row to another.
- Include manual transfers such as emails, spreadsheets, shared folders and phone calls, not only system interfaces.
- Number each handoff so it can be discussed and tracked.
Most processes have more handoffs than people expect. A purchase-to-payment process in a mid-sized business might have a dozen or more once manual transfers are included. Each is a potential gap.
Check what is verified
At each point ask what is checked, by whom and how it is recorded.
For every handoff, work through a short set of questions with people from both sides. Ask them separately first, then together. Differences between their answers are often the clearest sign of a gap.
- What does the sending side check before passing the work on?
- What does the receiving side check when the work arrives?
- Who is responsible for the work while it is waiting between the two?
- How would either side know if something went missing or arrived incomplete?
- Is there a record that the check was done, and who reviews it?
The two-sided question
Ask the sending team what the receiving team checks, and ask the receiving team what the sending team checks. If both say the other does it, you have found a gap.
Pay particular attention to handoffs between systems. Automated interfaces are often assumed to be reliable, but they fail quietly: a field is truncated, a record is rejected without notice, a currency is misread. Ask whether anyone reconciles what left one system with what arrived in the next, and how often.
Close the gaps
Add simple checks, clear ownership and records where they are missing.
Closing a handoff gap rarely needs a major project. Most fixes are simple, and the simplest effective fix is usually the best, since complex controls tend to be skipped under pressure.
- Assign ownership of the handoff itself: one person accountable for making sure work arrives complete and on time.
- Agree what the sending side guarantees and what the receiving side checks, and write it down in a line or two.
- Add a simple completeness check, such as a count of items sent and received, reconciled daily or weekly.
- Replace manual transfers such as emails and spreadsheets with system-to-system links where volumes justify it.
- Make status visible to both sides, so work waiting between teams does not disappear from view.
- Keep a record of each check, even a simple tick in a log, so it can be reviewed.
In the sales and fulfilment example, the fix might be as simple as a rule in the order system that prevents release to the warehouse until the credit check is recorded, combined with a daily report of orders for customers placed on hold after entry. Neither requires a new system. Both close a gap that might otherwise cost real money.
We spent months strengthening the approval step. The duplicate payments were coming from a spreadsheet passed between two teams that nobody owned.
Financial controller, distribution client
Making it routine
Handoff gaps reappear as processes change. Include handoffs explicitly in process reviews and audits, and revisit them whenever a system, team or supplier changes. When a control failure occurs, look first at the handoffs around the point where it surfaced.
It also helps to rank the handoffs by risk. Not every gap deserves the same attention. Focus first on handoffs where errors are costly or hard to reverse, such as those involving payments, credit, customer data or safety, and where volumes are high enough that a small error rate adds up quickly.
To begin, choose one process with a history of errors. Map it, number the handoffs and ask the two-sided question at each. You will probably find at least one gap within an afternoon, and most can be closed with a clear owner, a simple check and a record.
Source: Intelliversal analysis.
