The long handoff

What it is

Every operating model has a moment it is not designed for: the day the person who knows how it works leaves. For most of the industry's history that moment has been handled informally, a leaving do, a folder handed over, a promise that the new person can call. The long handoff is the alternative now being built at the top of the industry, and it is worth understanding because it will define how operations talent is managed everywhere else.

Two announcements in the past fortnight show the shape of it. MUFG Investor Services appointed McAllister Kirschner, its chief operating officer since 2018, as chief executive, a $1.29 trillion administrator handing the whole business to the man who has run its operations for the best part of a decade. And in September, J.P. Morgan confirmed that Julie Harris, global head of operations for asset and wealth management, retires in early 2027, with her deputy, Fred Crosnier, taking over on 1 January.

One is a promotion, one is a succession. Both are the same event: an operating model changing hands on purpose, with named people, named dates and a designed runway, instead of by accident, with a folder and a hope.

Why it matters now

Three reasons.

First, the operations function now runs the things the business is. MUFG Investor Services' business is administration. J.P. Morgan's asset and wealth management operations grew, under Harris, from roughly $2 trillion to more than $8 trillion in client assets under supervision, and its chief executive credited her with modernising "legacy ways of working" and building systems that can absorb more clients and activity without costs rising in lockstep. When the machine is the product, the person who runs the machine is the obvious candidate to run the firm, and that person's departure is a business risk, not a personnel matter.

Second, the runway is now a design choice with a price. J.P. Morgan's transition runs from a September announcement to a January handover to a retirement in early 2027. That is months of deliberate overlap, not months of courtesy. In a business where, as the accounts of the memo put it, small process hiccups can quickly become widespread service problems, the runway is the transfer mechanism. The firm is buying time to move ownership of the model, process by process.

Third, most firms are on the other side of this divide, and the divide is expensive. In most asset managers the operating model still lives in people's heads. The handoff is a handshake, and the firm discovers the gaps on the first morning after: the exception nobody knows who owns, the procedure that existed only in the departing director's memory, the sign-off that quietly stops happening.

What firms should do

First, treat the runway as a design decision. Name the successor, name the date, and use the space to transfer ownership of the model, not just the organisation chart. Months of overlap with nothing to transfer are just months of two salaries.

Second, transfer the ownership, not the job title. Every process has an owner. Every seam between systems has an owner. Every sign-off, review and re-certification date survives the person who held it last. A long handoff works when each of those ownerships is handed over explicitly, one by one, before the incumbent leaves. If the answer to "who owns this now" is a shrug, the handoff has already failed.

Third, draw the model before the person leaves. The operating model canvas is the only thing in the room that outlives both people. A firm whose processes, owners, seams and sign-offs are drawn can run a handoff on purpose, because the drawing is what transfers. A firm whose model is tribal knowledge cannot, no matter how long the runway, because there is nothing to hand over except the person.

The opmodal perspective

This is the discipline the Architecture Canvas methodology exists for, and it is also the industry's oldest unkept promise. Every operating model project eventually claims the knowledge will no longer walk out the door. The long handoff is what that claim looks like when it is true: the model drawn on a canvas, owned process by process, so that when the person leaves, what transfers is the drawing, the ownership and the sign-off cycles, and the firm keeps running without keeping the person.

The methodology's ninth principle applies with unusual force: sign-off is the beginning, not the end. A handoff is a process that drifts. The re-certification dates, the review cycles, the ownership decisions made on the way out, each of them needs owners and dates, because the moment the incumbent leaves, the space they occupied starts accumulating exceptions. The firms that re-certify the handoff the way they re-certify their processes will transfer the model intact. The firms that do not will keep the folder and lose the model, and discover which one they actually needed on the first contested exception.

Succession has always been treated as an HR matter, handled in confidence and announced in a paragraph. The past fortnight shows it is an operating model matter, and the firms that have noticed are already running the long handoff on purpose. The rest will run it by default, and by default it does not transfer the model. It transfers the risk.

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