The Door Between Departments: Why Your Process Handovers Are Costing You Time and Money
In many businesses I consult with—especially those with operational complexity or recurring revenue models—the biggest drain on efficiency isn’t poor performance, underwhelming tools, or even miscommunication. It’s the space between the teams.
Let me explain.
🚪 The “Door” Analogy
Imagine each department in your business as a room. Sales, operations, finance, customer success—all working hard inside their own walls. But when work needs to move from one room to another, a handover must happen.
Now picture a door between those rooms. Not a metaphorical one—an actual door. Where is it placed? All the way on the side, favoring one department over the other? Hidden around a corner, hard to access? Or right in the middle, where both sides can see it, reach it, and share ownership?
The position of that door says everything about your process maturity.
📌 In my experience, most departmental doors are either missing, misaligned, or stuck. And that misalignment creates rework, bottlenecks, miscommunication—and most critically—wasted time and money.
🔁 How to Find and Fix Your Doors
So how can you apply this thinking in your own organization? Here’s a quick framework I use in workshops:
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Start by mapping out where work moves between teams. Be specific—quote approval, project kickoff, invoice creation, etc.
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Is one team doing all the prep while the other just receives? Are both sides unclear who should take initiative?
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Redesign the process so both departments meet at the door. Define clear roles, shared data points, and mutually agreed triggers.
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Great systems like ActiveWhere don’t just track tasks—they define responsibility. Build your door logic into the system: workflows, approvals, reminders, and dashboards.
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After implementation, track how work flows. Are tasks stuck? Are emails being sent manually to “check” things? These are signs your door is still misaligned.
⚙️ Efficiency Is Alignment, Not Speed
Too many companies chase automation or software as a silver bullet for operational pain. But before automating a bad handover, fix the door first. It’s not about moving faster—it’s about moving better.
When the door is in the right place, everything flows. When it isn’t, everything drags.
👋 Looking for Help Aligning Your Processes?
I help operational and subscription-based businesses design and implement smarter handovers between departments—often using ERP/CRM tooling like ActiveWhere as the backbone.
If you’re seeing signs of friction, rework, or customer complaints after the baton is passed between teams—it might be time to take a closer look at your doors.
