7 April 2026

Every programme needs an owner and a signal

Automation programmes without named owners and clear success events become ghost work that nobody can review honestly.

Quiet office corridor with warm glass light

Teams inherit automation programmes the way offices inherit unused rooms — nobody remembers who unlocked them. Application analytics for programme health only works when each programme has a human owner and at least one success and failure signal.

Before you build scorecards, publish a programme catalogue: name, owner, intended outcome, and the events that prove it. Collapse synonyms, require a stable `program_id`, and document which client retries should not inflate failure counts.

Once ownership and signals exist, programme reviews become decisions instead of archaeology.