Hand-off Failure

An operational breakdown occurring at the boundary between two functions or process stages, in which responsibility for a work item transfers without the information, context, or authority required for the receiving party to complete their portion correctly.

Handoff failures are the most common root cause of cross-functional operational breakdowns because each function measures its own internal process performance without measuring the degradation occurring in transfer, producing dashboards where every function reports adequate performance while the end-to-end process output is consistently below standard.