Newsletter
You Don’t Stop the Work to Fix the Work. You Just Write It Down.
74 tickets in, here's what our internal ticket data actually shows about building a firm while running one, and why writing down friction beats absorbing it silently.
Modern Engineering Solutions
Engineer Your Freedom
The Modern PE
Aug 2026
You do not stop the work to fix the work. You just write it down.
We turned on ticket creation inside MES Tool a few months ago. Seventy-four tickets later, here is what the data actually shows — and why it changed how I think about building a firm while running one.
One of our engineers is closing out the month.
He opens his timesheet to log his hours before the period ends. The system shows the wrong date. It is not urgent enough to stop what he is doing, and it is not something he should have to chase someone down about.
Six months ago, that is a Teams message sent at an odd hour, half explained, probably misread as low priority by whoever sees it first. Maybe it gets fixed. Maybe it gets forgotten until it causes a real problem.
Instead, he filed a ticket in about thirty seconds and kept working. No interruption to his day, no waiting on a reply before he could move on. The ticket sat in a queue with a priority and an owner, and the fix happened in the background while the actual work of the firm kept moving.
That is the entire point. You do not stop operations to improve the tool. You keep working, you capture the friction the moment you feel it, and the people building the platform grab it on the fly without anyone losing a step.
What The Data Actually Shows
We turned on ticket creation inside MES Tool a few months ago and the team has used it hard. I want to tell you what that data actually shows, because it is not the clean efficiency story you might expect from a CEO writing about his own software.
74
Total tickets
filed
31
In the last
30 days
61%
Are bugs, not
features
77%
From chat and
time tracking
Sixty-one percent of those tickets are bugs. Not features, not improvements. Bugs. That tells you exactly where we are, which is early. We are not past the building phase. We are in it, and the ticket log is the evidence, not a highlight reel.
Building the future of the firm was never going to be zero friction. The question was always whether we would let that friction pile up invisibly or turn it into something we could act on.
One person on our small platform team is resolving nearly three quarters of everything assigned in the last month. I am personally submitting close to half the tickets myself, which means I am acting as the QA layer for my own platform, catching issues before the rest of the team hits them. Chat and time tracking, the two newest features, account for seventy-seven percent of all ticket volume. None of that is an accident.
Inside The Numbers
Ticket resolution
75%
Resolved by
one person
CEO submitted
~50%
Acting as QA
layer
Newest features
Chat & Time
77% of all ticket volume
You do not need a big transformation this week. You need to be a few percentage points better than you were last week, every week. That sounds small until you compound it. A team that gets two percent more efficient every week is a different company in six months and an unrecognizable one in a year.
The Ticket That Changed My Mind
The ticket that actually changed how I think about this system was not a bug at all. I needed a comment response letter for a city punch list on a project in Texas. I pasted the full letter into a chat and asked the AI to build a response template.
It searched our own skill library, found we had no standard for that document type yet, built the letter anyway, and saved it to SharePoint. The whole exchange became a ticket automatically, without me stopping to write anything down myself.
Nothing about that exchange was a problem to fix. It was a work session that improved the system just by happening. Six months ago it would have lived in a chat window someone forgot to screenshot. Now it is a retrievable record of exactly how that document got made, sitting in the same queue as every bug report.
That is the model. Operations never stops to fix the tool. The person doing client work flags what got in their way and keeps going. The person building the tool works from a live queue instead of a memory of a hallway conversation. Nobody is blocked waiting on the other. The end customer never feels any of it, because the work in front of them never slowed down while we improved the system behind it.
The Question Worth Asking This Week
The goal was never a perfect platform on day one. The goal is a team that keeps the client's outcome in view while quietly getting a little better every single week, so the compounding does the work that no single big fix ever could.
Pull the list of things your team complains about in the hallway and ask how many of them are written down anywhere a builder can act on. If the honest answer is close to zero, that is not a discipline problem. It is a systems problem. And it is the cheapest one you will ever fix.
What friction is your team absorbing silently right now instead of writing down and moving past?
Reply and tell me. I read every one.
Michael Groselle, P.E.
CEO / Founder, Modern Engineering Solutions
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