Client work rarely fails in the middle of a task. It fails at the seams: the moment one person finishes and another is supposed to pick up, or the moment everything waits on a document the client has not sent yet.
The invisible stall
A handoff that lives in someone’s head or an email thread is a handoff that can quietly stall. Nobody decided to drop it. It just stopped being visible, and what is not visible does not get followed up.
Make the seam a thing you can see
When every handoff is a visible step rather than an assumption, the firm can answer a simple question at any moment: what is this client waiting on, and who has the ball? That question, answered honestly, prevents most of the work that slips.
Progress over activity
A busy firm is not the same as a firm making progress. Activity is motion. Progress is work moving from one clear state to the next. Seeing the handoffs is how you tell the difference, and how you turn scattered activity into something you can actually track.