How the list was kept
The record behind this site is a spreadsheet with five columns and thirty-eight rows. This page sets out how it was made and where it is weak, because both matter for reading anything else here.
The columns
- What stopped, in one line.
- The week it stopped, counted from the start of the transition.
- Whether anybody said anything at the time: argued, asked, or nothing.
- What became of it, filled in later.
- A sentence, where there was one worth writing.
Columns one to three were filled in as each removal was agreed, in the meeting, taking a minute or two. Column four was completed on three later passes, at roughly six, twelve and eighteen months.
Where it is weak
It was kept by one person. Not by a process. It survived the end of the project because that person had it in their own files and happened to still be there.
The outcome column is a judgement. Deciding that a removal "surfaced as a problem" rather than "crept back" is a reading of what happened, made afterwards, by somebody who by then knew what this site now argues.
Seven entries were added retrospectively. They stopped without being proposed, and four of the seven were recorded more than a month late. Their weeks are approximate.
The classification of silences is recollection. The distinction drawn elsewhere on this site between four kinds of silence comes from conversations at eighteen months, which is a poor instrument. The one part of it that rests on documents rather than memory is which removals were agreed in rooms with nobody present who performed them.
The window is a decision. Seventy-eight weeks is where the record stops, not where the consequences do. Three of the fourteen never-missed entries guard against events that happen less often than once in that period.
What was deliberately left out
No money figures. The record does not carry them for any of the five problems, and inventing them would be worse than the gap.
No names. Not of people, not of the organisation, not of its suppliers or customers, and not of any of the procedures in a form that would identify a particular workplace.
The honest summary
It is one list, kept as it ran by somebody who was not keeping it in order to prove anything, and the only claim made for it is that it was kept.