Who is responsible for what

Two different questions that get one answer

"Who is responsible for the tender service?" gets an answer like "the yard is doing it". That is not the answer to the question asked. It is the answer to a different one: who is doing the work.

Responsibility and execution are separate facts, and almost every dropped job lives in the gap between them. The yard is doing the service. Who is making sure the yard turns up, that the price was agreed, that the part arrived, and that somebody looked at it afterwards? On a well run portfolio that is a named person. On most, it is whoever notices.

Name the owner, not the doer

For every piece of work, one person on your side owns the outcome. They may do none of the work. They are the person who would be asked why it did not happen.

Two rules make it stick:

• One owner, not a team. "The office" and "the crew" are not owners. Shared responsibility is the state in which everyone assumes someone else is on it.
• The owner survives the vendor. Changing yard does not change who owns the job. If it does, what you had was not an owner, it was a contact.

Written down, this is unremarkable. Unwritten, it is the most common reason a thing that everybody knew about did not happen.

Waiting on someone is a state worth recording

Most stalled work is not blocked in any dramatic sense. It is waiting: on a quote, on an owner's approval, on a part, on a decision somebody has not been asked for yet.

The useful distinction is between work that is waiting on you and work that is waiting on someone else, because the two need opposite responses. Waiting on you is a task. Waiting on someone else is a follow-up, and follow-ups are what quietly never happen.

Record which it is, and who the someone is. A list of things waiting on a named person is a chase list. A list of things marked "pending" is wallpaper.

Where the vendor boundary sits

An outside company doing your work needs a surprisingly small amount of information: what the job is, on which asset, by when, and who to ask. It does not need your internal notes on why the last contractor was replaced, what you have budgeted, or what the owner said about the quote.

That sounds obvious and it is routinely got wrong, usually by a single shared notes field that somebody writes candidly in and the portal then shows to the contractor. Decide which text is theirs and which is yours, label the two fields so the person typing can tell at a glance, and never let the money travel.

The handover inside the work

Responsibility moves during a job more often than people plan for: the captain raises it, the shore manager takes it, the yard does it, the office pays it. Each of those is a moment where the owner changes and nobody says so.

Two practices cover most of it:

• The owner changes explicitly, recorded, rather than by implication. "It is with accounts now" is a state, and someone in accounts owns it.
• Completion is somebody's decision, not an automatic consequence of the vendor saying they are finished. Their word ends their work; accepting it is yours.

What this looks like in Meridian

Every work item carries an assignee, who owns the outcome, and separately a vendor, who may be doing the work. They are different fields because they are different facts, and an item can carry both.

Waiting and blocked are flags rather than stages, so an item that is underway and waiting on the owner's approval reads as exactly that, and returns to underway when the approval lands instead of restarting. The Portfolio screen counts what is blocked or overdue together, under Needs attention, because a job nobody can move and a job three weeks late need the same response from you.

Vendors sign in to their own portal and see the jobs assigned to them and nothing else. The scope you write for them is a separate field from your internal notes, labelled as theirs, and the money on the item is never visible to them at all. That boundary is enforced in the database rather than in the screen, which is the only place a boundary of that kind holds.

See how the operations view works, or read when a spreadsheet stops working, which is what happens when none of this is written down anywhere.