28/10/2026
How Operations Teams Improve Cross-Team Handoffs
What happens when important customer requests get lost, teams work with different information, and business owners spend their time firefighting instead of growing their businesses?
Our CEO, Renier Smith, shares his firsthand experience with these challenges in his contribution to COO Insider. From managing insurance repair operations with spreadsheets to building a more accountable workflow through PlanMyCrew, his message highlights why clear communication, ownership, and reliable technology matter.
Here is his complete message:
Our biggest handoff problem was fragmented communication. We work in insurance repairs, where a contractor may serve multiple insurers, each with unique instructions, limits, evidence requirements and service-level rules. At scale, relaying those details between office staff, supervisors and field teams through calls, spreadsheets and messaging groups becomes a nightmare. A small customer request can disappear, photographs lose their context, and two experienced people may approach the same problem differently.
When I started, "SaaS" was not even part of my vocabulary. I relied heavily on Excel, but spreadsheets quickly became another source of stress: different versions circulated, information was manually captured, and nobody could confidently see the complete history of a job.
The change that helped most was giving every job one accountable owner and one shared record containing the contract requirements, instructions, customer requests, photographs, updates and approvals. The work could change hands, but its information and accountability remained attached to it. We eventually built this workflow into PlanMyCrew because the tools available to us did not adequately solve our problem.
Today, entrepreneurs can build software much faster—including through AI-assisted "vibe coding"—but speed creates another responsibility. A system holding customer details, photographs and contractual information must protect that data, control who can access it, maintain backups and have a recovery plan for failures. Otherwise, a tool intended to reduce risk can expose private information at scale or leave the entire operation stranded when it crashes.
The personal cost is also rarely discussed. New business owners are learning operations while simultaneously learning to lead people. Before we fixed our handoffs, the constant uncertainty and firefighting created stress that followed me home. My daughter still remembers an incident from that period.
Reliable handoffs are therefore not merely about efficiency. Clear ownership, one trusted source of information and properly governed technology reduce rework, protect customer promises and remove a significant emotional burden from business owners and their families.
Read the full contribution on COO Insider:
https://cooinsider.com/qa/how-operations-teams-improve-cross-team-handoffs/
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