Operations

Blockers and SLA

A blocker written on the Issues line opens a record with a clock. If it stays open past the SLA the owner is nudged, the manager is flagged, and the teammate who last touched that area may get a heads-up.

Opening and closing

  • Any Issues line other than a no-blocker phrase opens a blocker with the check-in time as opened-at.
  • When a later standup no longer reports a blocker, the record resolves itself.
  • Replying resolved, done, unblocked or fixed to a reminder closes it. Replying with a status while still stuck pauses the reminder for one SLA cycle, records the update, and flags your lead so it does not silently stall.
  • Intent is read with negation awareness: still not fixed keeps it open; no longer blocked closes it.
Issues: waiting on the PO for the new licence
still waiting on the PO
resolved

The SLA scan

Every 15 minutes the scheduler snapshots every open blocker and keeps those older than the SLA that are due for a nudge: never nudged, or last nudged at least one SLA interval ago. It messages the owner, messages the owner’s manager, stamps the nudge time and writes a flag row to the audit log. A blocker nudged ten minutes ago on a two-hour SLA will not fire again for two hours.

  • Setting the SLA to 0 disables the scan. People on the never-DM list are never nudged.
  • The blocker reminder passes the shared message gate, so it waits for a working day.
pulse.blocker_sla_enabled
pulse.blocker_sla_hours

Routing to context

With the blocker router agent enabled, keywords from the blocker are matched against teammates’ recent Today sections and the best match gets a heads-up quoting the blocker and the words that matched, with the date of their standup. The asker is told who was pinged. See Runtime agents.

Where blockers show up

  • The Today page counts them; the per-employee report lists pending items with their since-dates.
  • The on-call hand-off recap and the weekly manager digest list blockers, the digest only those older than 24 hours.
  • The Q&A agent answers recent blockers with your last five.
  • Impact settings let you state a baseline for how long a blocker typically costs, used in impact estimates.
impact.blocker_baseline_days