Warm Handoffs :: Luckymike’s Tech Notes

… generally the guidelines are:

  • If someone asks a question in the wrong channel, and you know the right channel, link their question in the right channel, tagging them, and explain why you’re making the handoff, along with any additional context you have.

  • If someone asks a question in the wrong channel, and you’re not sure where it should go, link their question in a shared channel asking who can help, along with any additional context you have.

That’s it!

You can’t just recommend them, you have to encourage and reinforce them. They are premised on two values:

  1. most people want to help their peers, and
  2. most people want to get their own work done.

When inter-team support requests create a conflict between these two values, folks tend to resort to the quickest solution that meets both needs, the Cold Redirect. To break this tendency, you need to establish that a Warm Handoff is expected in lieu of a Cold Redirect, not just preferred.

See also, from Warm Handoffs Redux: