Effective team management is of critical important for most organizations, including business enterprises and government agencies. A key issue that can affect the performance of a team is how well handoffs are managed when a team member needs to transfer his/her responsibilities to another team member. In this Phase I SBIR project, our aim is to develop a theory that can be used to identify the key information that should be conveyed in a handoff, and a practical approach for applying and testing the theory. In particular, a theory should enable identification of the salient context that is required for a successful handoff. In addition, a theory should help one assess technologies, such as a knowledge management software, that can support successful handoffs in specific government and industrial settings of interest. The general direction we propose to investigate is motivated by concepts that have been developed in previous work on AI planning and decision theory, which will enable us to quantify the utility of conveying different facts in handoff situations. In addition to developing a foundational theory, we propose to consider how we would apply and evaluate the theory in three application domains. The first domain involves nursing shift handoffs, the second domain involves handoffs between IT personnel working on applying patches in response to vulnerabilities, and the third involves a biosecurity intelligence application where an analyst might have to work on a project started by a colleague.
