Every job list distinguishes done from not done. Almost none distinguishes not done because nobody has got to it from not done because it cannot move. Those two need completely different responses, and treating them the same is how weeks disappear.
Why blocked is the dangerous one
Overdue work is visible. It is late, everybody knows it is late, and the response is obvious: remind somebody.
Blocked work looks like work in progress. The car is on the ramp. The job is assigned. Somebody is on it. From the outside – which includes your outside – there is nothing to see. Meanwhile it is waiting on a part, an approval, a supplier or somebody else’s decision, and it will keep waiting until a customer creates the pressure that your system failed to.
Ask a workshop owner what holds up a week and they will say parts. Ask a property manager and they will say contractors. Ask a clinic and they will say labs. In every case the work is not late through neglect; it is stopped, and nobody with the power to unstick it knows.
The two mistakes
Mistake one: chasing blocked work as if it were late. This is the common one and it is actively destructive. You remind a technician for the third time about a car that is waiting on a turbo they ordered eight days ago. They can do nothing. What they learn is that telling you about a blocker changes nothing and earns them a nagging, so next time they will not bother telling you – and now the blocker is invisible as well as unsolved.
Mistake two: recording the status without the reason. “Blocked” on its own is nearly useless. Blocked on what? Waiting on whom? Since when? A status with no reason cannot be acted on by anybody, so it gets skipped over in the morning review and the job ages quietly.
What to do instead
Four rules, and none of them needs software.
- Make blocked a first-class status. Not a flavour of late – its own thing, with its own place in your morning look at the day.
- Always capture the reason, in their words. “Waiting on the rotors from Keystone, ordered Tuesday” is actionable. “Blocked” is not.
- Escalate it the same day. Blocked work needs a decision, usually from whoever can ring a supplier or authorise an alternative. That is you. A reminder to the person who is stuck achieves nothing.
- Stop chasing the person while it is blocked. They have told you. The ball is elsewhere. Chasing them anyway is how you teach them to stop telling you.
Look at age, not count
Once blocked is separated out, the number to watch is not how many there are – it is how long the oldest one has been sitting. A workshop with four blocked jobs, none older than two days, is running well. A workshop with two blocked jobs, one of them eleven days old, has a problem that four days ago was a phone call.
The same applies to property maintenance, where the eleven-day-old job is also the one the tenant has now reported twice, and to clinics, where the outstanding lab result is the one the patient is about to ring about.
So put two things in front of yourself every morning: what is blocked and on what, and which of them has been sitting longest. If you do nothing else from this article, that pair of numbers will surface the expensive jobs before your customers do.
How we handle it
Bosun treats blocked as its own status precisely because of the failure above. When somebody writes “the Ford is still stuck, we’re waiting on the parts department”, the job moves to blocked, the reason is recorded verbatim, the owner is told that morning, and the automatic chasing stops for that job until it is unblocked. It is one of the smaller design decisions in the product and one of the ones owners notice first.
More on how updates are read in end-of-day updates, and on what stops the chasing in automatic follow-up.