Items in depth
Every field on a board item, where each one comes from, and what happens when two arrivals are the same thing.
An item is one piece of work. Everything on a board is one, and every run is against one. The fields are few on purpose — an item that carried everything would be a database row rather than something a person can read at a glance.
- Source
- Where it came from, recorded at intake and never rewritten. Six weeks later this is what tells you whether a problem arrived by mail, by marketplace message, from a stock alert, from a call, or because somebody lifted it out of team conversation.
- Status
- Where it is in its life. See the status vocabulary; the words mean the same thing on the board, in the brief and in the trace.
- Owner
- A person or an agent. Unowned means triage — arrived, matched by no brief yet.
- Reference
- The external identifier where one exists: an order number, a purchase order, an invoice. What you would type into the other system.
- Evidence
- What has been gathered. Tracking reads, photographs a customer sent, the supplier's reply. This is what makes an approval a comparison rather than a description.
- History
- Every run, handoff and decision against this item, in order.
When the same thing arrives twice
A customer who messages on the marketplace and then emails about the same order has produced two arrivals and one problem. The reference is what ties them together: where both carry the same order number, the second attaches to the existing item rather than opening a new one.
Where neither carries a reference — a message that says only “where is my stuff” — there is nothing to match on, and two items is the honest outcome. This is one of the strongest arguments for briefing an agent to ask for an order number rather than to infer one: the inference is what creates a wrong merge, and a wrong merge is much harder to notice than a duplicate.
Aging
Items carry how long they have been in their current state, and that is what the daily brief reports as the oldest waiting item. An item aging in triage is a briefing gap; aging in the approval queue is a reading gap; aging in working is usually a source that keeps timing out.