Most of the List Is Not Going to Be Fixed
Last timeDeciding What Matters
You will not fix most of what you found, and that is the correct outcome. Write each one down as a decision with a reason, an owner and a date, so it is not an oversight.
Most of the list
The ranked list from the previous lesson has thirty or forty items on it.
You are going to fix five or six.
That is not a failure of the exercise and it is not a confession. It is
the normal and correct outcome, and the alternative is worse in a specific
way: a plan that schedules a fix for every item will be abandoned at item
nine, which means the remaining thirty are accepted anyway, silently, with
no reason, no owner and no record. Deciding not to fix things explicitly
is the only way of not fixing them honestly.
- findings accepted, which is most of them and the part that needs writing down
- findings the enumeration pass produced
- findings actually scheduled for a fix, which is a small number by necessity
| reason survives | somebody answers for it | can be revisited | how much it helps, 0 to | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fixed | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| quietly dropped | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| accepted, written down w | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| accepted in a meeting, n | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What makes it a decision
An acceptance written badly is indistinguishable from an oversight six
months later, and that is the test to apply: would a new engineer reading
this know that somebody considered it.
accepted: no record of who read a customer record
what an operator can read any account, unlogged
loss if used 40k, per the asset register
rate 0.4 a year, because it has happened twice
why accepted the logging work needs the console rewrite,
which is already scheduled for next quarter
owner head of customer operations
revisit when the console rewrite starts, or 90 days,
whichever comes first
would change any regulated customer onboarding, or one
further incident of this kindFour fields do the work. The two numbers come straight from the ranking
and they are what makes the acceptance proportionate rather than lazy. The
reason is one sentence and it must be a real reason: the fix is expensive
relative to the loss, or it depends on work already scheduled, or the
mitigation in place is adequate. Because we did not get to it is not a
reason, it is a description of what happened.
And the last field, what would change the answer, is the one that
distinguishes an acceptance from a permanent state. It names the condition
the decision rests on, which means somebody can notice when the condition
fails.
The lesson stops here
3 more paragraphs to go
You have read the opening. The rest of the argument, the problems that check whether it landed, and the lines worth keeping at the end all come with a plan.
The first lesson of every course in the library reads the whole way through, free, so you can see exactly what the rest of them are.
See the planThe contentsThis is the reading half
Starting the course gives you your own copy of it. Every idea on every page has problems standing under it, marked with a reason rather than a tick, and any sentence you do not believe can be opened and argued with. None of that can happen on a page nobody owns.
The contents