Delivery exceptions

A delivery week can include blocked tasks, issues, risks and milestones approaching their due dates. These records sit with the project that the time entries refer to. An issue carries severity, status, owner and reporter note. A risk carries category, probability, impact, mitigation and owner. A milestone has a project, due date, status and owner. They give a delivery lead a way to explain why hours or dates changed while the team continues to record time.

• Raise and triage issues. An issue starts Open. The Issue Triage workflow moves an existing Open issue with severity to Triaged and writes an operation receipt. An invalid attempt is blocked and receives a failed receipt.
• Follow risk. Delivery Lead reviews Open and Monitoring risks with their probability, impact and mitigation. The risk record stays attached to its project.
• Check milestones. Project Manager reviews Pending and Missed milestones by due date and owner, then records the outcome when a checkpoint is met or missed.

Agree how severity is chosen when an issue is raised and who owns triage. The triage guard requires severity, so a missing value needs correction before the workflow can complete. Set a regular review of blocked tasks, open risks and pending milestones in the project meeting. Define what evidence the team attaches when a milestone outcome or issue resolution needs explanation. The delivery lead should also review failed receipts because a blocked operation may otherwise look like a completed status change to someone reading only an activity list. Keep the issue triage workflow distinct from later issue status updates.

Take a project whose task is Blocked because of a defect. The delivery lead creates an issue against that project with an owner, severity and reporter note. Setting the issue to Open starts triage; the workflow changes it to Triaged and records a successful receipt. Now remove severity from another Open issue and set its status to Open. The workflow should block the change and record a failed receipt. The issue remains Open until someone supplies the missing severity and retries triage. Add a Pending milestone with a due date and owner, and a project risk with mitigation. The project manager can view these together with the blocked task and decide how to reschedule work. Approved time entries remain decisions about work already logged, even when the delivery plan changes.

• Open Issues — Open, triaged and in-progress project issues with severity and owners.
• Milestones At Risk — Pending or missed checkpoints ordered for review by due date.
• Blocked Tasks — Assigned work that needs an intervention before progress resumes.

Use issue triage to rehearse the guard and evidence review to check the receipt trail.