A Handover Note for Automation Stops: What the Next Person Needs When a Scheduled Job Pauses Itself
Automations that stop themselves are a good sign, provided the stop is understandable. A job that halts after an unexpected input and leaves only a vague error forces someone to reconstruct what happened. This article proposes a short handover note that a scheduled workflow writes at the moment it pauses, aimed at a non-specialist who must decide what to do next.
Inputs to collect
The note should be assembled from information the workflow already has. Record the name of the job and the time it paused. Record the step it was on, described in plain words such as "adding new enquiries to the customer sheet". Record how many items it had handled, how many remained, and which single item caused the pause, with enough identifying detail to find it. Record the reason in one plain sentence, for example "a required field was empty". Finally, record what the job has not done, stated explicitly, so nobody assumes completed work.
Branching decisions
The note should end with three labelled options, and the person reading chooses one. Resume: appropriate when the cause was temporary or the item has been corrected. Skip the item and resume: appropriate when the item is not needed or can be handled by hand, with a reminder to record who handles it. Cancel the run: appropriate when the cause suggests many items may be wrong. Add a plain sentence on what each option would change, and on what it would not change.
Decide in advance who is notified, and give that person a deadline for acting only if your team genuinely has one.
A hypothetical worked example
Imagine a fictional weekly job that copies new enquiries into a shared sheet and sends each customer an acknowledgement. It pauses on the fourteenth of thirty items. The note reads: job name, time, "Step: sending acknowledgements." It states fourteen items processed, sixteen remaining, and the paused item as the enquiry from a named test address with an empty email field. Reason: "no email address, so no acknowledgement could be sent." It then states: "Not done: acknowledgements for the remaining sixteen items." Options follow. Resume after adding an address. Skip this item and resume, noting that someone must contact this person another way. Cancel, if several recent items look similar. The person on duty picks the second option, records who will follow up, and the job continues.
Stop conditions
The workflow should pause rather than continue when an item is missing a required field, when the same error occurs twice in a row, or when the number of items is far larger than usual. It should not retry endlessly. After a pause, it should not resume on its own unless someone has chosen an option.
Small acceptance checks
Trigger a deliberate pause with a test item. Check that the note names the job, the step and the cause in plain words. Check that the counts of processed and remaining items add up to the total. Check that the note says what was not done. Check that exactly three options appear and each says what it changes. Check that a colleague unfamiliar with the job can read the note and choose without opening technical logs. Check that the note is stored where the person on duty will actually see it.
This template is a proposal. Trim it to fit your tools, but keep the explicit statement of what has not been done.