How it shows up
The question is always some version of: where is it? A customer calls. A manager pings. A technician is pulled off the work to explain the work.
Why it happens
Status was never a field. It was a conversation. The systems record transactions. They do not publish a picture that each audience is allowed to see.
If nothing changes
Every information request generates administrative work for someone else. At scale, operations spends increasing time explaining the work rather than performing it.
Money
Unbillable hours spent on 'just checking'. Delayed jobs because the person who could do them is on the phone.
Time
Meetings whose only purpose is to read out what a screen should have shown.
People
The most reliable employees are interrupted the most, because they know.
Process
There is no shared picture, so every stakeholder builds a private one.
Customers
They should not need to call you to know what is happening on their file.
Risk
Issues surface as complaints.
Growth
Each new customer multiplies inbound status traffic.
Questions worth asking
How often does someone ask for status in a normal week?
Who answers, and what do they stop doing to answer?
What would the customer be allowed to see without a call?
When does management see a slip: when a person reports it, or when a screen does?
If volume doubled, could you still staff the 'where is it' channel?
When it is working
A customer sees the state of their file. A technician sees the next job and what it needs. A manager sees exceptions. Nobody's job is to be a search engine.
What we might actually do
Portal
Customer or partner visibility with the right slice of the truth.
Operational views
Queues and exceptions for the people running the work.
Notifications
Tell someone when their action is needed. Stop making them poll.
A dashboard
Only after the underlying status is trustworthy. A chart of guesses is worse than a call.
When software is the wrong first move
- There is no agreed definition of status. A portal would display an argument.
- The business will not decide what a customer is allowed to see.
- The data does not exist yet and cannot reasonably be captured.
Where we see it
Roles this hits
Related problems
Selected work
Comparable files are walked through in a working session. We do not invent percentages for the website.
Describe the process as it runs. A specification is optional.