Weeknote - 10 April 2026

A short week has a way of exposing what is actually under control.

With bank holiday Monday gone and Friday off, the week was effectively three working days. In that window, the work I owned directly moved well. I closed off the appraisal narrative, finished an overdue planning review, and got lead inputs into quarterly planning earlier than expected.

The more interesting bit was what happened to work once it had left my hands.

A few items that depended on follow-up or input from elsewhere stayed less visible than they should have done. That was not really a story about people not pulling their weight. Teams were busy, including onboarding activity and the usual delivery pressures. The issue was that once I had handed work over, I treated some of it as more settled than it really was.

That is the lesson I am taking forward.

Delegated does not mean done. It means I still need enough grip on the hand-off to know whether the work is progressing, waiting, or unlikely to land this week. In a compressed week, that check needs to happen earlier. Wednesday is a control point. Thursday is often just late diagnosis.

So the improvement for next week is straightforward: make "waiting on" work more explicit, keep delegated items visible until they are complete or consciously deferred, and force the conversation earlier when something is not realistically going to happen.

Linked notes

• Delegated does not mean done
• Kanban, feedback loops, and waiting on
• Team Topologies and the cost of distance
• Further reading on delegation, visibility, and scale

Lesson learned

Delegated does not mean done. As the work scales, I need better visibility of hand-offs and "waiting on" items so I can intervene earlier, not just notice later.