Part IV · Chapter 8 · The Second Year · lesson 1
The Monday after the report arrives
11 min
Builds on The bill is not the audit fee
Part IV · Chapter 8 · The Second Year · lesson 1
11 min
Builds on The bill is not the audit fee
The report arrived on a Friday afternoon as a PDF with a cover page. Somebody put it in the sales channel with three fire emojis. The consultant invoiced the last milestone, handed over a folder of templates, and left.
On the Monday there was no project. There were eleven recurring calendar invites, spread across seven people, five of whom had not been in the room when the cadences were picked.
That Monday is what this whole track is about.
Predict
A deadline is a forcing function. It makes one instance of a control into somebody's urgent problem, and urgent problems get done.
Take the deadline away and nothing about the control changes except its standing. The quarterly review now competes for the same Tuesday as a customer escalation, a release and a one-to-one, on equal terms, judged by the person whose Tuesday it is.
What replaces the deadline is thinner than people expect: a recurring invite, and a name. The invite has no consequence for being declined. The name belongs to somebody who did not choose it.
So the question to carry through this track is not whether a control is important. It is whether anything other than the invite would notice.
The date. Until Friday there was a thing everybody was working towards, and it settled every argument about priority. Now there is a date eleven months away, which settles nothing.
The person who held the map. The consultant knew which evidence lived in which tool, which quarter was thin, and which of the eleven controls had been written to describe what the company already did rather than to change it. Most of that was never written down, and the folder of templates is not it.
The attention. The executive who chaired the weekly call chaired it because a deal was waiting on the report. The deal closed.
Eleven recurring invites. Four quarterly, five annual, two monthly. Each one carries a title, a cadence somebody picked in a meeting, and an owner.
What an invite does not carry is why the cadence is what it is, who the second pair of eyes is meant to be, or what to do when the thing being reviewed has changed shape. All of that lives in one person's head, which is the subject of the tenth lesson in this track.
Something people say
“The hard part is getting the first report. After that you are compliant and it maintains itself.”
Which of these is the mechanism by which a second year goes wrong?
The first report is a project: a deadline, a budget, a sponsor and an end. The second is an operating commitment with none of those, which has to produce the same artefacts at the same cadence while competing with ordinary work for the same hours.
Nothing in that sentence is about security, and nothing in it is difficult. It is about whether eleven things happen on time in a year when nothing makes them.
Check