Handover generation assembles a departure or leave handover from the actual record of a person's work — the threads they owned, the documents they maintained, the approvals they gave, the recurring commitments they carried — rather than from what they can recall and are motivated to write on their final week.

Why memory is the wrong source

Even a conscientious person writing a thorough handover will systematically omit the most valuable material. Expertise makes routine work invisible — anything done for long enough stops being an explicit task and becomes a habit. And they cannot know what the successor won't know — the things omitted are so obvious to them they don't occur to mention.

What the generated version contains

Active threads (open correspondence with no resolution, ranked by external party and age). Recurring obligations (repeating activity patterns — monthly, quarterly, tied to a date). Sole ownership (documents, systems and relationships where this person is the only participant). Access and entitlements. Recent decisions. Relationship map. Unfinished commitments. The recurring obligations section is consistently the most valuable, because it is the one a human writer is structurally least able to produce.

It should be a draft, not an output

The generated version supplies coverage. The person supplies judgement — why the supplier needs the nudge, which relationship is fragile, what was tried and abandoned. Handing someone a substantially complete draft to correct and annotate is a very different request from handing them a blank template during their notice period.

Not just resignations

Extended leave (parental, sabbatical, medical). Role changes (internal moves, where handover is routinely skipped). Continuity preparation — generating handovers for key roles that are not vacating at all, refreshed twice a year, is one of the cheapest insurance policies a business can hold.