Everything we said is either done or on the list

A weekly report is full of small promises. “Next week we will measure this.” “That fix goes out on Friday.” “We’ll come back to the Spanish pages.” Each one is easy to write. Eleven reports later there are more than a hundred of them, and nobody remembers them all. Not the client, and not us.

So on an affiliate website we have worked on for eleven weeks, we set ourselves one test: confirm that everything we have told the client is either done or on the roadmap. This is how we ran it, and what came out.

How we ran it

• Every report was read again, from the first one. Three independent readers went through all eleven and pulled out every commitment: anything that said we would do, check, measure or come back to something.
• Each commitment was looked up. In the list of open work, in the list of finished work, in the content queue and in the daily log. A commitment counted as closed only with evidence: the change is live, the measurement exists, or there is a written reason it was replaced.
• The doubtful ones were checked a second time against the site itself, not against our notes about the site.

That gave about 125 commitments. Most were done, still open and tracked, or replaced for a reason that was written down at the time.

What had slipped

The rest are the reason to do this. None of them was a broken promise in the usual sense. Nobody had decided to drop anything. They had fallen between two lists.

• Items moved from one list to another, then lost in a cleanup. A batch of tasks had been handed from the engineering list to the content queue. Weeks later the queue was trimmed, and most of that batch went with it, with no line saying whether each item was done, dropped or still wanted.
• Things said once and never closed. A sentence in week five, another in week eight. Each was true when written. None had a later line saying what became of it.
• Measurements promised and not taken. We had said we would take a reading on certain dates. The dates passed during a busy release and the readings were not taken.
• The opposite problem: work that was live but still marked open. Several changes had been on the site for days while the roadmap still called them pending. It is harmless until someone plans next week from that list.

Every one of these now has a line on the roadmap with its own number. The readings we did not take are stated in the next report as not taken.

A sent report does not change

One rule made the check possible: a report that has been sent is frozen. If something in it turns out to be wrong, the correction goes into the next report, or into a short note of its own.

We had to use that rule on another project the same month. A weekly report for a sales management tool asked the client for something they had given us months earlier. We sent a one-page correction the same day: what was wrong, what it changes, and what stays as written. The original report still says what it said.

It is a little uncomfortable, and it should be. A report that gets edited quietly after it is sent is no longer a record. And when a vendor’s past reports cannot be wrong, you cannot check their current one against them.

Why this matters when you pay for hours

When you hire a team by the month, the reports are most of what you have to judge the work by. They only help you if three things hold:

• Each statement can be checked. “Done” comes with where to look.
• Nothing leaves the list in silence. An item is finished, replaced with a reason, or still there. That is the same rule we apply to a priority list in a fixed month of work: every task is reported, done or not.
• The report agrees with what was said elsewhere. Before this one went out, we compared it with the week’s chat messages to the client, and rewrote its opening when the two did not match.

How to ask your own vendor for it

You do not need tools for this. Pick the reports from three months ago and ask:

• Of the things you said you would do here, which are done, and where can I see each one?
• Which were dropped, who decided, and when?
• Which are still open, and where are they tracked today?
• Has anything in a past report been corrected, and how would I know?

A team that works from a single list can answer in a day. A team that cannot answer has probably not broken its promises on purpose. It has lost track of them, and for you the result is the same.

The habit that would have prevented most of it

Almost every item that slipped had been written in a report and nowhere else. The fix is small: anything a report says we will do gets its line on the roadmap before the report goes out. A promise that exists only in a sent document has no owner.

This is the part of working inside a client’s business that nobody sees in a demo: the work is only as trustworthy as the record of it.

See how an ongoing engagement works