Keeping operational work moving
Managing work across buildings, contractors and internal teams creates a complex chain of responsibility.
Within askporter, this project focused on what happens when a task remains unresolved: who becomes responsible, when they need to act and how that responsibility moves through the organisation.
As Lead Product Designer, Fábio developed an escalation framework that connected these decisions directly to the operational workflow.
Overdue work. Unclear ownership.
Teams already had emails, dashboards, reports and reminders. Yet overdue work continued to accumulate.
The underlying problem was uncertainty about who should act next. Managers had to monitor reports, chase updates and intervene manually when service commitments were at risk.
The design needed to address three connected challenges:
- Ownership: make responsibility clear as unresolved work progresses.
- Flexibility: accommodate different buildings, teams and service requirements.
- Visibility: keep escalation information accessible within everyday work.
Make accountability part of the workflow.
Discovery pointed towards a gap between tracking work and assigning responsibility when that work became overdue.
The approach brought escalation into the product itself, supporting both administrators setting policies and operational teams carrying out tasks.
Three principles guided the experience:
- Configure rules where they apply. Associate escalation policies with individual assets and their operational requirements.
- Reuse established policies. Allow assets to inherit rules from a parent asset.
- Keep responsibility visible. Make escalation status and ownership available in the context of the work.
A clear path for unresolved work.
The solution introduced configurable escalation levels, defining how responsibility progresses when tasks remain unresolved.
Administrators could:
- Assign an owner to each escalation level.
- Set escalation timings.
- Add notification recipients.
- Configure rules across task groups.
- Inherit policies from parent assets.
This created a structured way to route accountability through the organisation, while keeping the configuration connected to the assets and tasks it supported.
Shared rules. Local control.
Applying the same policies separately across a large portfolio creates unnecessary configuration work.
Inheritance allowed assets to reuse a parent’s escalation rules, helping teams maintain consistency across locations.
Local control remained important. When an asset needed its own configuration, administrators could disable inheritance. The confirmation flow explained the consequences, making the relationship between shared policies and local settings explicit.
This balanced efficient setup with the flexibility required by different operational environments.
Keeping conversations connected to the work.
Conversations, files and updates sit alongside the task they relate to. Teams can review the context, find supporting information and follow previous decisions without piecing together separate conversations.
Clearer responsibility when work needs attention.
The framework connected escalation rules, ownership and timing within a single operational experience.
It gave administrators a consistent way to configure policies and reuse them across assets, while providing a clearer path for handling unresolved work.
The central value was making responsibility easier to understand and act on, reducing reliance on separate reports and manual follow-up.
