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Act 3: Day-to-Day Operations

15. Communication (Notices & Notifications)

Story

Sarah publishes company notices and important updates through the platform so employees always receive clear and organized communication.

From policy announcements to urgent alerts, employees stay informed through dashboard notices and notifications delivered to the right audience at the right time.

Happy Path

Company announcements and notifications are published successfully, allowing employees to receive timely updates through dashboard alerts and configured delivery channels.

Publishing is the trigger, and it fires once. The audience scope does double duty: it decides who can read the notice and who gets told about it, so the two can never drift apart — All reaches everyone in the company, Employee reaches company members holding no role beyond Employee, and Admin reaches everyone holding another company role. The alert lands in the bell menu and is pushed live to anyone already signed in. The admin who published it is left out, because they already know.

Priority decides whether the alert also leaves the app. LOW and NORMAL stay in-app; HIGH and CRITICAL are emailed to the same audience on top of the in-app alert. That split exists so routine announcements do not train people to ignore the sender.

  • Write a notice with title, message, priority, audience scope, and an expiry date — it is saved as a draft
  • Publishing is the moment the notice becomes readable, and the moment its audience is notified
  • Employees view notices directly from their dashboard
  • Notice visibility is organized by priority and publish date
  • Read tracking records which employees have viewed announcements
  • HIGH and CRITICAL notices are emailed as well as alerted in-app
  • Email delivery respects an employee's notification preferences

Failure Modes

FailureWhat the user seesWhat happens next
Notice expiry date is earlier than publish dateValidation rejects notice configurationSelect a valid publish and expiry date range
Notice reaches its expiry dateExpired notice becomes automatically hiddenRepublish or extend notice duration if needed
Notification or email delivery fails while publishingThe notice still publishes and is readableDelivery is best-effort and retried by the queue; a broken mail server never blocks an announcement

Edge Cases

ScenarioBehaviorWhy
Notice published at HIGH or CRITICAL priorityEmail is sent on top of the in-app alertPriority is the only urgency signal a notice carries, so it is what decides whether the alert leaves the app
Employees configure notification delivery preferencesAn explicit email opt-out for notices is honoured; the in-app alert still arrivesOpting out of mail is not opting out of the notice
A published notice is editedNo second alert is sentA notice is announced once; publish a new notice if people need telling again
Notice audience matches nobodyNothing is sent and the publish still succeedsAn empty audience is a scoping mistake, not a reason to block the notice