A handover is five minutes that saves the next person an hour at 2am. Do it live (call or chat thread), same time every rotation, and write the answers down where the next person will look.
The handover
Open items
- Any incident open or recently resolved? Link it, plus what "watch for regression" means for it
- Anything degraded but not incident-worthy? (The "it's been flaky since Tuesday" knowledge that never gets written down)
- Any alert currently silenced or muted — and when does the silence expire?
Changes in flight
- Deploys or migrations in the last 48h that haven't been through a weekend/peak yet
- Planned changes during the next shift (deploys, maintenance windows, DNS changes)
- Anything a customer was promised, with a date
The basics (verify, don't assume)
- Alerts actually reach the incoming person's phone — send a test
- They can log in to: the app's admin, the host/infra console, the status page
- They know the escalation path: who's second, and when to wake them
Rules
- "Quiet week, nothing to hand over" still gets the meeting. Half of handover value is the silenced-alerts and changes-in-flight questions you wouldn't think to ask yourself.
- The outgoing person writes the notes, the incoming person confirms. Memory of a verbal handover doesn't survive the first page.
- Escalating is not failing. State it every handover until it's culture: waking the second is always allowed, and a false alarm costs less than an hour of solo panic.