What is ball-in-court, and why does it matter?

Exactly one owner

Not two. Not a department, which cannot be chased, cannot be escalated to and cannot explain why an item is sixty days old. Not “being looked at”, which is a mood.

One named person, at any given moment, in whose court the ball currently sits. When they act, the ball moves and the owner changes — and the record shows both.

The phrase that hides the failure

“It’s with the consultant.” This is the single most common way an item ages to death on a construction project, and it works because it is TRUE. The ball genuinely is in their court. Nothing you can do.

Except that it is a status, not an excuse. Somebody on your side still owns chasing it, escalating it, and serving notice about it if the delay becomes a delay. The ball being in someone else’s court does not remove your obligation to know how long it has been there — and in a delay claim, “we were waiting for them” is worth precisely nothing without the record of having chased.

Which makes ageing-by-owner the lens

Not ageing by module. The person carrying eleven overdue items spread across five modules looks entirely fine in each of the five — this is not negligence by anyone, it is an artefact of how the lists are drawn.

One list per person, across everything, read oldest-first. That is the weekly review, and it should be uncomfortable, because a comfortable weekly review is one that is not looking at the right list.

Terms

• Ball-in-Court