One-Sentence Summary

Built a manager-facing exception-reporting process that surfaced work stranded by departing employees without forcing users to monitor another report every day.

The Context

This project grew out of a workflow system that tracked assigned work well for active employees but made it easy for tasks tied to inactive resources to disappear from normal operational visibility.

The Challenge

Our workflow system was doing a great job of tracking tasks assigned to active resources through the life cycle. The challenge, inactive resources disappeared from most of the standard system views. They were there, just no longer seen.

Why It Was Hard

The missing work was not actually gone; it was hidden. At the same time, the user experience was already crowded, so solving the visibility problem by adding more screens or making managers check another report every day would have created its own operational burden.

The Constraints

• Our workflow system already had many (some say too many) screens with various data views. Adding additional views or even filter options to unassigned tasks would just add to the cognitive load.
• Adding additional reports to our self-service business intelligence solution provided visibility into stuck unassigned tasks, but requiring managers to open a report every day just to see if they had something to do seemed to be too much, especially since most of the time, there would be nothing for them to do.

The Approach

While we had to have a report that shows any stuck unassigned tasks, we do not need to add another report managers needed to check every day just to usually find ou t that all is well. Instead, we decided to email the report to managers who have stuck tasks that they need to clear.

My Role

I designed and implemented the back end while my colleague developed the end-user report.

Key Decisions

• Push the report to managers only when they had stuck tasks to review instead of adding another screen or expecting a daily manual check.
• Pair backend exception logic with a separate end-user report so the solution could be both operationally useful and easy to consume.

The Outcome

While we had to fine-tune the solution a few times, it successfully reduced stuck unassigned tasks which increased our timeliness and quality. Our one major refactoring was to take advantage of newly introduced alerts in PowerBI. We now let managers configure

Evidence / Signals of Success

• The process reduced stuck unassigned tasks.
• The reduction in stuck work improved timeliness and quality.
• The solution was valuable enough to justify a later refactor that took advantage of Power BI alerts.

Resume Bullet Seeds

• Designed and implemented backend exception logic for a leavers-report process that exposed work stranded by inactive resources and reduced stuck tasks for managers.
• Chose a push-based reporting model over additional screens or manual report checks, improving operational timeliness and quality while limiting user cognitive load.

Interview Story Angles

• Solving an operational visibility problem without making the interface noisier.
• Choosing push notifications over another pull-based report.
• Collaborating across backend and report design responsibilities.
• Adapting a useful solution later as new alerting capabilities appeared.

Lessons Learned

• Leavers Cause Things To Be Lost
• Human Resources are Dynamic