by Serguey Shinder
In 2023 I led the move of our customer accounts out of an old billing system and into our main platform. We spent a fortnight planning it properly, and at the end the whole migration existed as thirty four tickets on a board, each of them sized, sequenced and assigned. I remember being pleased by how tidy it looked.
For the next seven weeks my day had one shape. I opened the board in the morning, picked the next ticket that was mine or blocked on me, and worked on that until it moved. It felt like focus, which in a sense it was. The board went green column by column, and in the last week of August the final ticket closed.
The migration did not work. Accounts had moved and invoices ran, but customers on quarterly billing in arrears were billed again for a period the old system had already invoiced. Nothing in any ticket was wrong. The gap sat between two of them, one that moved balances and one that set the next billing date, and each had been done correctly against its own description. The question of how those two decisions combined for one particular kind of customer had been in my head during the planning fortnight and had not been in any single ticket, so it was never anybody's work, including mine.
What had happened to my attention was simple, once I saw it. It had taken the size of the unit I tracked it in. For seven weeks the largest thing I thought about in a day was one ticket. The migration as a whole, the thing the tickets were meant to add up to, had not been looked at by anybody since the second week of June. We had cut a problem into pieces so it could be tracked, and then done all our thinking at the size of the pieces.
Tickets are still how we track work. What changed is that a piece of work that big now has a single page describing the whole of it, what it must be true of when it is finished and the few places where the parts have to agree, and that page is the first thing I open on a Monday rather than the board. Half an hour, most weeks, reading it against what has been done and asking whether the pieces still add up to the page. It has caught three things in two years, each of them in a gap between two tickets.
The board tells me what to do today, and it is very good at that. It cannot tell me whether today's work is still part of the thing we set out to build, and for seven weeks I let the best tool I had for the first job stand in for the second.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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