Field note · 30 August 2026

Eight Statuses. One of Them Means Done.

Our issue board has eight statuses. Exactly one means done, and it's called "pass", like the work barely scraped through.

A support engineer told the users to clear their browser cache. The users wrote back to say they had managed to open it without clearing the cache. He replied: "Well noted." The fix was not applied. The problem is fixed.

Our issue board supports eight statuses: to do, in progress, planning, on hold, update required, requires attention, fixed — to be confirmed, and pass. They describe the week better than days do.

To do

AI made us fast, the business noticed, and the expectation is now double the work in half the time. What unsettles us isn't the pace. It's how quickly the pace stopped being remarkable. A 116,000-record migration, turned around in a day. Banal.

Planning

09:08, a meeting is requested for 11:30. 09:27, the team can only do the afternoon. The meeting existed for nineteen minutes.

On hold

A bank integration has been silent for over a month. The named contact is on leave. The thread has been handed to two colleagues, at least one of whom will also, in due course, go on leave. This isn't cynicism. It's August.

Update required

"Please share the attachments as I cannot locate the attached as you claim." As you claim. We have read a lot of contracts. We have never seen three words do that much work.

Requires attention

A client asked whether we could switch off two-factor authentication for testing and, two lines later, proposed we train everyone to set up two-factor authentication. Same email. Neither half is wrong.

Fixed — to be confirmed

We reconciled the issue tracker against the code. Six issues were closed with no code and still sitting on the board as "to do". Four were tagged "conflict". Someone had to create that tag.

Pass

At 03:01 every morning an automated report says one of our systems is healthy. It is the only correspondent that wants nothing from us.

Three rules, set over two decades: don't go live on two projects at once, don't migrate legacy data, don't implement during stabilisation. All three are broken. Nothing is where we left it, and we have never enjoyed the work more.

(Clients, colleagues and numbers stripped out. The dysfunction is ours to share; theirs isn't.)