How do you stop an issues log becoming a graveyard?

Why logs die

They die because an item can sit at “in progress” indefinitely and nothing happens to it. The status field is being maintained. The issue is not.

And nobody escalates it, because escalating somebody else’s stale item is socially expensive — you are, in effect, telling a colleague they have failed, in writing, in front of the project. So the item ages. And the reason it ages is very often the same reason nobody raises it.

The three rules that keep it alive

None of them are clever. All of them work by removing a judgement call from somebody who has a reason to avoid making it:

• Review by age. Sort the log oldest-first, every week. An item open for sixty days is telling you its owner cannot resolve it and has not said so — regardless of what its status says.
• Escalate by published trigger, not by mood. Aged past the threshold, repeated, or ignored: the rule fires, and no individual has to volunteer to be the one who raised it.
• Name a person, never a company. “The MEP subcontractor” cannot be asked why an item is sixty days old, and cannot explain itself.

And keep the thread when it escalates

This is the subtle one. An issue that becomes an RFI is usually marked resolved — and the RFI is now tracked somewhere else, by somebody else. Two systems, one problem, and a gap precisely at the handover.

Keep the issue open until the instrument it became is ANSWERED, not until it is raised. Otherwise your log will tell you the issue was resolved, when what actually happened is that it was forwarded.