A handover has no owner

The company wanted recurring revenue and was losing it between people rather than inside them

An 8 to 10 week sprint, from June 2025. A global industrial equipment company of around €850M revenue. A standalone piece, not part of a series.

The client wanted to grow its aftersales business. Aftersales is the service, spare parts and inspection revenue that follows a machine for its whole working life, and it carries a higher margin than the machine did. The company was not short of demand for it.

The engagement record names four faults: unclear roles, fragmented handovers, slow quotation response, and limited visibility into customer needs and inspection follow-ups. Read them together and they are one fault seen four times. Every one of them sits between two people rather than inside one job.

The consequences follow the same shape. Delayed conversions, underused Account Manager time, and missed service opportunities. An inspection happens, an engineer writes it up, a quote should follow, and somewhere in that sequence the thread drops. Nobody dropped it on purpose and nobody could point to where.

Without targeted improvements, the record states, the client risked losing share to more agile competitors, underutilising high-margin service offerings, and failing to convert inspections into repeat business.

An account manager owns accounts and an engineer owns inspections, so the gap between them belongs to nobody

Concede the obvious first. Nobody in this company was confused about their own job. The account managers knew their customers, the service engineers knew the machines, and both could describe their own work in detail.

That is the problem, not a mitigation of it. A handover is the one part of a process that no single role can see. The account manager sees a request arrive late and reads it as the engineer being slow. The engineer sees a report go unanswered and reads it as the account manager being busy. Both are describing the same gap from opposite sides, and neither description contains it.

So a handover has no owner, no measure and no meeting. It is nobody's objective. Fixing it means somebody sitting between two roles for long enough to watch the same sequence happen many times, which is precisely the work that loses to whatever is on fire this week.

There is a second reason, and it is the one that makes this expensive to get wrong. A company operating in 12 countries cannot tell a local habit from a systemic fault by looking at one country. Ask in one country and you learn how that country does it. The same answer in twelve places is a process problem. A different answer in twelve places is a standardisation problem. They need opposite responses, and from inside any one country they are indistinguishable.

Six uninterrupted months inside the business would have produced this answer. The evidence was all internal. What the company did not have was somebody able to spend those months crossing borders while the quarter carried on.

Four faults that each belonged to somebody else became one process with named owners

What that enables. A conversation about the process rather than about each other. Two people describing the same gap from opposite sides will argue about who is slow until somebody puts the sequence on one page, at which point the argument becomes a design question with an owner.

One number is reported here, and two on the record are not

The €13M is an identified opportunity across named bottlenecks. Not contracted, not forecast, not banked.

The engagement record also carries a 30% figure for sales process time streamlined and a 40% figure for conversion uplift attributed to highlighting spare part urgency. Neither is published here. The first states no qualifier and no baseline, so there is nothing to check it against. The second asserts that one change caused a conversion improvement, which needs a before figure and a comparison the record does not describe.

That is the harder of the two to leave out, because a causal claim is exactly what a reader wants and exactly what an 8 to 10 week sprint is least able to prove. If the client measured it afterwards, the number belongs to them and they should publish it.

No change was implemented during the sprint and no outcome after handover was observed. The engagement produced the map, the ranking and the recommendations.

Source. All figures come from the SprintlyWorks engagement record for Streamlining Sales to Boost Predictable Aftersales Income, a global industrial equipment company of around €850M revenue, June 2025: 34 interviews conducted, 12 countries assessed, and €13M in uplift opportunity identified. The quote comes from its Vice President, Global Services. We describe clients, never name them, and no country, customer or product from the engagement appears here.

Tell us the question nobody has the bandwidth to answer

We run 8 to 10 week sprints for industrial companies that have a decision to take and no spare team to take it with. You get named people, a defined question, and the evidence in your hands at handover.

If the problem you are looking at lives between two roles rather than inside one, the six-month test is the wrong question to start with. Ask a narrower one instead. Who would be accountable if this went wrong, and can you name them? If you cannot, you have found the gap.

Tell us the question. We will tell you whether a sprint can answer it, what it would take, and what you would hold at the end. If a sprint is the wrong tool, we will say so. Write to rahul.abhisek@sprintlyworks.com.