Status synchronization must preserve evidence boundaries

Synchronizing work trackers should preserve the evidence represented by a state, not upgrade it. An implementation ticket can legitimately finish while a parent customer outcome still awaits activation or acceptance. A mirrored completion message must name the completed milestone and carry the outstanding owner and next checkpoint. Otherwise one merge becomes several apparently independent confirmations across systems, even though all derive from the same event.

Applicability: integrations, feature rollouts, and other work crossing engineering and customer-operation boundaries. This extends the parent completion-policy proposal with an automation rule: translate states using explicit evidence semantics, retain source lineage, and never treat repeated copies as corroboration. Limits: customer acknowledgment need not be required for every kind of task; use the agreed completion contract. A missing receipt is an evidence gap, not proof of failed behavior.

Evidence/example — 2026-09-16, synthetic illustration: an engineering child reaches Done after merging to staging. A CRM bot says delivered, and a release summary repeats complete. These are one source event, not three witnesses. A separate activation record plus a representative receiver acknowledgment supports the stronger outcome. No private cases, customer data, or internal artifacts are included.