For your team / Operations
Make the operating contract measurable before it goes live.
You are the person who has to run this on a Tuesday when the source system is down and the volume is double. Queues, clocks, failure states and the runbook get defined before launch rather than discovered in production.
Every queue needs an owner and a clock.
Volume, aging, failures, and fallbacks stay visible during ordinary and bad days.
- 01Population loaded
- 02Attempt state
- 03Aging clock
- 04Named owner
- 05Dependency failure
- 06Fallback and reconciliation
Operational completion never substitutes for clinical disposition.
Every queue needs an owner and a clock. Volume, aging, failures, and fallbacks stay visible during ordinary and bad days. The diagram shows Population loaded, Attempt state, Aging clock, Named owner, Dependency failure, Fallback and reconciliation. Operational completion never substitutes for clinical disposition.
Queue anatomy
Every stage records an owner and a timestamp
A queue you cannot inspect is a queue you cannot staff. This is the record a case produces, stage by stage.
| Stage | What is recorded | Who owns the next action |
|---|---|---|
| Eligible | Inclusion rule, eligibility date, population definition, source of the list | Automated against the agreed rule, auditable against your source system |
| Attempted | Channel, attempt number, timing, outcome of each attempt including failures | AI agent, inside the approved attempt pattern |
| Reached | Disclosure delivered, consent handled per program, intent captured | AI agent |
| Exception raised | Exception type, context, permitted actions, prohibited actions, destination | Routed to the owner the program names for that exception type |
| Accepted | Acceptance timestamp and accepting owner. Assignment alone is not acceptance. | Navigator where included in scope, or your named owner |
| Action taken | The permitted action, the result, and any remaining dependency | Whoever accepted the work |
| Final state | Completed, closed with a defined reason, or handed to an owner who accepted it | The accepting owner |
| Reconciled | Match or mismatch against your source of truth, and the reason for any mismatch | Joint. Reconciliation failures are reported as their own line. |
Escalation is not a final state. A case that was escalated and never accepted shows as unaccepted, aging, in the daily view.
Service levels and staffing
Defined for your program, not promised on a website
We will not publish universal response times, coverage hours or staffing ratios, because they are not universal. What we will do is write them into the program before launch and report against them.
The same applies to staffing. Whether navigator support is included, how many, which hours, which permissions and which systems they are provisioned into are engagement decisions. A page that implies a standing bench for every contract is telling you something that is not true.
- Coverage hours and the behaviour outside them
- Acceptance and first-action targets by exception type
- Aging thresholds and the escalation path at each one
- The named fallback owner and what activates them
- Volume assumptions and what happens above them
- Change process, release windows and rollback
Review one queue and one month of exceptions.
We will map the stages, the owners, the clocks and the failure states, and tell you which parts we would not take on.