Blocked work that no one revisits is how projects quietly slip. Escalation Tiers make that impossible to ignore by escalating on a clock, not on someone remembering.
The three tiers
- 24 hours blocked: the task escalates to its owner at medium severity.
- 48 hours blocked: the project health flips to at-risk, and severity rises to high.
- 72 hours blocked on the critical path: it escalates to the CEO and Engineering Manager at critical severity.
How it runs
A background job runs every 15 minutes, comparing how long each task has been blocked against the tier thresholds. Each tier is deduplicated, so a task does not re-escalate the same tier repeatedly. The job has a kill switch and isolates failures per tick.
Where escalations go
Escalations are persisted as records and surface in the dashboards in real time. Leadership and admins can resolve them. (For the record: an earlier internal note claimed escalations were written to the wrong table and never appeared. That was fixed; escalations persist and surface correctly.)