Flow · 6 steps · 6 known jams
A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier.
Finished when
The thing exists, runs, is in the buyer’s possession, and the buyer can change it — or have somebody else change it — without asking the supplier for anything.
Done when The outcome is written as a condition that can be true or false, by somebody other than the person who wrote it.
Where it stops
The brief describes activity. Redesign the site, improve the funnel, modernise the stack.
An activity has no end state, so there is nothing to be finished. Both sides sign it because it is agreeable, and the disagreement is deferred to the point where it is expensive.
Cost. Every later dispute in this flow traces back here. A brief with no condition in it cannot be delivered against, only argued about.
Done when Acceptance criteria exist, in writing, and both sides hold the same copy of them.
Where it stops
Acceptance criteria are written at the end, by the supplier, describing what was built.
Writing them first is uncomfortable — it forces decisions while everyone is still optimistic — so it is postponed, and after that there is never a natural moment.
Cost. The buyer loses the only instrument they had. Whatever arrives will meet criteria written to describe it, and no work has been done wrong by that standard.
Done when Scope, price, and what happens when scope changes are in one document that both sides can produce on request.
Where it stops
“We agreed that on the call.”
Change is agreed verbally because raising paperwork mid-project feels adversarial. Under UAE law added scope is not billable unless the client authorised it and the increase was agreed, so the informality cuts in a particular direction here.
Cost. Two versions of the truth, both sincerely held, and the more expensive one usually belongs to whoever has better notes.
Done when The thing exists in an environment the buyer can reach, not only on the supplier’s machine.
Where it stops
Progress is reported as percentages that move steadily and then stop at ninety.
Percentage complete against an unspecified whole is an opinion. The last ten per cent is where integration, migration and everything nobody scoped lives, and it consumes a third of the elapsed time on most engagements.
Cost. The buyer discovers the real state at the point where changing supplier is most expensive, which is why the reporting shape survives.
Done when The buyer has checked it against the criteria written at step two, in their own environment, on their own data.
Where it stops
Acceptance by demonstration — a call in which the supplier drives.
A demo shows the paths the presenter chose. It is a sincere presentation of the working parts and it is not a test, because the person who built it is selecting the inputs.
Cost. Faults are found by customers after the invoice, at which point they are change requests rather than defects.
Done when Accounts, source, data and documentation are in the buyer’s name, and somebody has proved it by changing something without the supplier.
Where it stops
The handover is a folder and a walkthrough.
Transfer treated as a task at the end rather than a condition held throughout. Registrar, repository, analytics and payment accounts were opened in the supplier’s name because it was faster on day one.
Cost. The buyer owns the work and not the ability to run it. This is the state most often discovered during a sale, when the register cannot be produced and the price moves.
It is the default because it is pleasant and feels like progress: everybody sees the thing working and the mood in the room is agreement. But the supplier chooses the path, the data and the order, so what is demonstrated is the set of things that work. Nothing dishonest has to happen for the result to be misleading.
InsteadAcceptance against the criteria written before the work, run by the buyer, in the buyer’s environment, on the buyer’s data, including the cases nobody wants to try. A supplier confident in the work loses nothing by this, and a supplier who resists it has told you where to look.
Every process has a written form and an actual one, and the queue is always in the actual one. We map what happens, from the records rather than from the meeting.