- One practice that you'll see in almost every workplace
is handing off tasks to different people.
This is typically called handoffs for short.
What usually happens is that you finish your work
and then hand it off to someone else.
So a software developer might finish some code
and then hand it off to a tester to test the code.
In large organizations, handoffs are so common
that most people don't even think about it.
It's simply accepted as the way to work.
It's like a fish not being aware
of the water they're swimming in,
but the handoffs can be a very inefficient way
to work, much like multitasking.
There's a lot of overhead.
A lot of time gets wasted
waiting for someone else to finish their work.
One of the challenges with handoffs
is that it encourages large batches of work
to go through the system.
This is usually called the queue size.
If you have large batches of work
going through the system, then people are going to process
these batches at different speeds.
So it's almost like an expressway
where a few lanes of traffic are backed up
and others are empty.
Some cars would be crawling forward,
while others would be speeding along.
So at some point, everyone's either speeding or crawling.
This relationship between how these batches of work
decrease your overall efficiency is not always easy to show.
If you can keep your batch sizes smaller,
it will make it easier to limit your handoffs.
That will keep the traffic on your team running smoothly.