Forty-one defects issued on a Tuesday, all of them due Friday. Not because anything about them was due Friday. Because Friday was the default in the site manager's head, and typing a date for each one would have taken twenty minutes he did not have.
By Friday afternoon nineteen were done, twelve had somebody on them, and ten had not been opened. The following Tuesday all forty-one were overdue in exactly the same way, and the number on the dashboard said 41 in red, which is a number that tells you nothing except that the dashboard is working.
The due date is not a deadline. It is a sorting key.
Here is the opinion. Most builders use a due date as a threat, and a threat you make forty-one times at once is not a threat. The due date is useful for one thing only: so that when you look at the list on Monday, the thing that matters most is at the top and the thing that can wait is at the bottom. If every item has the same date, the list has no top.
So the question "when is this due" is really "compared to what". A missing handrail on a stair the apprentices use is due now. A chipped tile in a unit that hands over in six weeks is due in two. A membrane that needs the waterproofer back, a drying period and a re-inspection is due when the waterproofer names a date, and the date you type is his date, not your hope.
Three items, three clocks. Give them one date and you have told the tiler the handrail is as urgent as the grout, which he will quite reasonably take as permission to do the grout first.
Priority first, then the date falls out
The practical fix is to stop typing dates and start picking a priority, because the date follows from it. A set I have seen work on most jobs, and which I would defend rather than claim as gospel:
Safety, today. High, inside two working days. Standard, a week to a fortnight depending on how close handover is. Waiting on something, the date the trade gives you, written down with their name beside it.
The point is not those exact numbers. The point is that two people issuing defects on the same job on the same morning give the same kind of item the same kind of date. Once that holds, "overdue" starts meaning something, because the only way an item gets overdue is that someone genuinely let it go.
In IssuesId the priority is a field on the record and the due date goes on at the moment of issue, while you are standing in front of the thing. The trade's email carries the job, the room and the photos, with a link that opens it without a login. What you have done is attach a clock to the item, and the clock is visible to the person who has to beat it. That is different from a date in your spreadsheet that the tiler has never seen.
Measure from pick-up, or the number lies
A thing I got wrong for years: measuring how long defects take from the day they were found. It feels right, and it punishes the wrong person.
A defect found on the Tuesday walk, issued on Wednesday, picked up by the trade on the following Monday and finished on Tuesday is a one-day fix with a six-day wait in front of it. The wait is yours. The fix is theirs. If the only number you have is seven, you will have a conversation with the trade about speed when the conversation you needed was with your own office about issuing on the day.
So the register needs two clocks. IssuesId stamps a defect in progress the first time it leaves open, and that stamp never moves. The list filters on logged date and on in-progress date independently, which gives you both answers: how old is this, and how long has someone actually been on it. The gap between the two is where the chasing time hides, and it is almost always bigger than anyone in the office believes.
Overdue should be an event, not a colour
The red 41 on the dashboard is the problem in one picture. It is information presented in a way that requires somebody to go and look, and nobody goes and looks on a Friday afternoon.
The fix is to make overdue do something. In IssuesId that is a workflow rule on the overdue trigger: the item passed its due date without progressing, so notify the trade again, tell the site manager, re-flag it. Immediate rules for the things that cannot wait. A digest rule for the rest, which runs on a schedule and sends the whole outstanding list to whoever ought to be uncomfortable about it on Monday at seven, before the toolbox talk.
The Monday email is the part that actually changes behaviour, and it changes it on the office side as much as the trade side. A site manager who knows the list is going to his director every Monday issues defects on the Tuesday he finds them, because a defect that has been sitting un-issued for a week shows up in that email as his.
Read it by trade, not by scrolling
Once the dates mean something, the trade review stops being a scroll through four hundred rows. The Issued To report groups what is open by who it is issued to, in PDF or Excel. Filter it to items past their fix-by date and the review is one page per trade: on time, behind, and the oldest thing on their list. Save that report and schedule it, and it arrives without anyone remembering to run it.
A tiler who gets that page every Monday, with his own name at the top and his own items in date order, does not need the phone call. The page is the phone call.
The forty-one, run again
Same Tuesday walk. The handrail is Safety, due today, and it goes to the steel fixer with an immediate rule behind it. The grout is Standard, due in ten days, which the unit's handover date makes reasonable. The membrane is waiting on the waterproofer, and the date on it is the one he gave on the phone, with his name next to it.
Friday afternoon, nothing is overdue, because nothing was due Friday. The following Monday at seven, two items are, and two people hear about it before they have parked.
Forty-one items with one date is a list. Forty-one items with the right dates is a plan, and the difference between them is about twenty minutes on the Tuesday. The question behind all of this, how long a defect should take to close, has a longer answer at how long should a construction defect take to close, and the honest version of it is: as long as the date you gave it, and not a day longer in silence.