Glossary
What is an honest close?
Ending a commitment by comparison rather than checkbox: delivered as committed, delivered with named differences, or not delivered — the difference recorded in words whenever the result was not clean.
The close is what makes every earlier claim auditable: whether estimates run light, whether early commitments miss more often, what "high confidence" meant in practice. A "done" checkbox destroys exactly that data at the moment it is freshest.
Honest close vs closing the ticket vs a retrospective
Closing a ticket records that work stopped. An honest close records how the result compared with the promise — which is a different fact, and the only one that can later tell you whether your commitments mean anything. A retrospective is different again: it asks how the team worked and what to change. The close comes first and feeds it; a retrospective without an honest close is a discussion about a result nobody wrote down.
A worked example
The commitment: customers can export their invoices as CSV and PDF by the end of June, delivered by the backend and frontend teams. The close: delivered with differences. CSV export shipped before the date. PDF export did not — the generated documents failed the accessibility review late in delivery, and the team chose to ship CSV on time rather than slip both. PDF is now a separate demand with its own decision.
Three sentences, and they carry everything a later reader needs: what was promised, what happened, why, and what became of the gap. The lesson writes itself from there — for customer-facing documents, book the accessibility review at commitment, not at the end.
Common mistakes
Closing as "delivered" while the differences stay unspoken, which teaches everyone that the close is a formality. Writing the difference about people rather than about the work, which teaches everyone to write less next time. Closing weeks late, when nobody remembers what the original promise said. And treating "not delivered" as something to avoid recording — it is the most informative close there is, and the one most often lost.
Related terms
- Delivery outcome — The explicit close of a commitment: what actually shipped, and — when the result is not a clean delivery — what differed from the promise.
- RAG status — A traffic-light health signal on delivery — on track, at risk, off track — that is a judgement by the person accountable, not a computation, and is only worth reading when the reasoning comes with it.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.
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