A seller can prove its dispatch board assigns work correctly while the buyer keeps two assignment records. Which record counts, and from what date for each shift, is a buyer decision. In the hypothetical rollout below, the project plan never records it, so every feature test passes and the operating change stays undefined.
Take a hypothetical field-service company with day and night dispatch shifts. A new dispatch board went live for the day shift. The statement of work lists feature tests: a dispatcher creates a job, assigns a technician, the job reaches the technician’s phone, status changes come back. Each passed, and the buyer signed off. The night shift still assigns work from a shared spreadsheet. The project plan says the board replaces the spreadsheet and gives a switch date for days only.
At 2:40 a.m. a care home calls with no heat. The night lead logs it in the spreadsheet and sends a technician, who is still in the boiler room at 6:00 when the day dispatcher takes over. The board shows no such job. At 6:20 a care home worker who has not seen the technician calls again, and the day dispatcher, finding nothing open, books a new job and sends a second truck. That dispatcher followed the only record the day shift had been told to use.
Each feature test asked whether the board behaves correctly when a dispatcher uses it. None asked where a night assignment lives, so none could have caught this. The double dispatch exposes a company with two places to record an assignment and no written rule for which one governs at 6:00 a.m. That rule is an operating decision that needs the buyer’s authority. On its own, the incident says little about fault on either side.
I would start with an entry in this plan, owned by a named person at the buyer, probably the operations director sponsoring the rollout. It states that the board is the authoritative assignment record for days from one date and for nights from another, and lists each exception by name. If nights keep the spreadsheet for storm callouts until the on-call roster is on the board, the exception says so and names who decides when it ends.
The sponsor then needs evidence that nights switched, which these feature tests do not supply. After the night date, I would look for board timestamps on night jobs close to when the calls came in, with no batch of older calls entered just before 6:00 a.m., and a spreadsheet edit history that goes quiet except for the recorded exceptions. Locking the spreadsheet would close one path. A list can still move to a notepad or a group text, so a locked file shows only that the file is locked.
The buyer may have good reason to defer the night switch, such as the approaching winter peak. The plan should then say so: the spreadsheet remains the authoritative record for night assignments until a date to be set, and the operating change is incomplete. Whether the seller has met its obligations is a question for the contract, and a status line cannot answer it.
That entry still leaves the care home job unsettled. It was opened on the spreadsheet at 2:40 a.m., and at 7:15 the technician reports that a part is on order. A rule that gives each shift its own record is silent on where that update goes. Until the buyer decides that case, whoever holds the day desk decides it, one job at a time.