An increment is reported green. The person who built it says the work
is done. The person who owns the result says it is not on track.
Neither of them is wrong. They are reporting against different
objects.
The builder reports against the work package. The tickets assigned
were closed, the code was delivered, the specification was met. By
that measure, done is done.
The owner reports against the outcome. The process is not yet usable
end to end, the interfaces behind it were not in scope, and the
department that was supposed to work with it is not ready. By that
measure, nothing has arrived.
Both statements go into the same status field. Whichever one gets
entered first becomes the truth of the meeting.
The confusion is not about diligence. It is about a role that was
never separated:
• delivery is who does the work
• ownership is who is accountable for the result
• status is a statement about the result, so it belongs to the
owner
Where those two are the same name, status is a report about activity.
Activity always looks better than outcome, because activity finishes
on schedule far more reliably than outcomes do.
A second mechanism sits next to it and makes the first one invisible.
When an increment carries more tickets than anyone can hold in view,
there is no aggregate — there is a list. A list cannot be reported, so
someone estimates. An estimate under time pressure, in front of a
committee, comes out green. Not from dishonesty. From the absence of
anything to calculate.
Take the last status report you signed off. Go through the green
items, and for each one write down two names: who did the work, and
who is accountable for the result being usable.
The diagnostic rule: wherever those two names are the same, you are
not looking at a status. You are looking at a delivery note. And
wherever the second name cannot be filled in at all, the item was
never being steered — it was being worked on.
Cordula Buss · Plan A2C / Helping finance and programme leaders build
steering logic that works.