What ready means

Ask three people whether a space is ready and you’ll get three answers, all of them sincere. The person who put out the seating is confident. The person still waiting on a microphone is not. The person who has not left the storage room has no idea. Nobody is lying — they’re each looking at a different part of the room.

A run is one space being made ready by one time. ReadyFactor calls it ready when four checks pass, and not a moment before.

The four checks

Required setup work finished

Every required task is either complete or has been deliberately skipped. Optional work is excluded entirely.

Skipping counts as finished on purpose. Someone decided the work wasn’t needed this time and said so, and that decision is recorded with their name against it. That’s a different thing from work nobody got to, and the report tells them apart.

Required gear at its zone

Every required gear case has been confirmed present at the zone that needs it.

Confirmed means a person said so, standing there. A case that’s “definitely around somewhere” has not been confirmed, and this check doesn’t care how confident anyone is about it.

Help requests resolved

Every request raised during setup has been resolved or withdrawn.

This is the check that most often holds a run open, and it should. A request is someone saying they’re stuck. A run that goes ready with an unanswered one is a run that quietly decided the problem didn’t matter.

Every required zone signed off

Every zone that is switched on and marked required has been confirmed ready by its lead. Switched-off and optional zones are exempt.

The other three checks count things. This one asks a person. Someone who was in that zone looks at it and puts their name to it — which is the part a checklist can’t do for you.

What ready deliberately doesn’t mean

It doesn’t mean perfect. Optional work can be untouched. A zone you switched off is not a gap; it’s a decision you made when you planned the run.

It doesn’t mean nothing went wrong. Requests are expected. The check is that they were dealt with, not that they never happened.

It doesn’t mean on time. Ready and the ready time are separate facts. A run can pass all four checks late, and the report records when each thing actually happened rather than when it was supposed to.

What happens when all four pass

The run can be signed off, and that sign-off produces the readiness report — a record of who did what, when, what was skipped and by whom, and what was asked for along the way.

That report is the point of all of this. It’s what you hand to whoever is accountable for the space: the record that ready was a fact somebody can check, not a feeling somebody had.

If you’re looking at a run right now and it won’t go ready, the four checks above are in the order they usually fail. Start with the help requests.