Task assignment and tracking in TeamMap: a guide

Patrols cover the routine. Tasks cover everything else: the dock that needs unlocking at 0700, the contractor who needs an escort, the follow-up nobody did on last week's incident. This is how tasks get created, assigned, verified and chased in TeamMap.

When is it a task and not a patrol?

The line is easy to draw once you have it. A patrol is a loop somebody walks. A task is a specific thing somebody does, and it is either done or it is not.

Patrol	Task
Recurring route, same stops	One item, at one place, with an owner
General observation	A specific action
Standard checkpoints	Whatever location the job needs
Complete when the loop is walked	Complete when the action is verified

The work that lands as a task, in practice: access requests, escort duties, equipment and area inspections, incident follow-up, maintenance the guard spotted and facilities needs to know about, event setup and breakdown, and the administrative work that otherwise lives on a sticky note.

If you are still working out which routine work belongs on a route instead, routes that repeat on schedule and where to place patrol checkpoints cover that side.

What goes into a task

Seven fields. The last one is the one that decides whether the task record is worth anything later.

Field	What it does	Example
Title	What the guard sees in the list	Unlock Loading Dock B
Description	The instruction, in full	Unlock at 0700 for delivery, re-lock at 0900
Priority	Low, medium, high or urgent	High
Due date and time	When it has to be done by	0700
Location	Where the work happens	Loading Dock B
Assigned to	A named guard or a group	Morning shift
Verification	What the guard has to produce to close it	Photo required

Creating one runs in the order you would expect: open Tasks, create, fill in the detail, set priority and due time, assign it, choose the verification method, attach anything the guard needs to read, save.

Tasks that come out of an incident

Most follow-up work starts as a line in an incident report that nobody actioned. Linking the task back to the incident it came from keeps the two together, so the incident closes with its follow-up attached rather than on the strength of somebody's memory.

That link is also what makes the incident file readable six months later, when a client or an attorney asks what you did about it. Writing incident reports people read goes into what the original entry should have said.

How urgent is urgent?

Four priority levels, and they are worth defining once in writing so that urgent still means something at the end of a bad week.

Priority	Expected response	Looks like
Urgent	Now, drop what you are doing	Safety hazard, active situation
High	Within the hour	Suspicious person, access emergency
Medium	Within the shift	Escort request, inspection
Low	Within a day or two	Documentation, non-urgent maintenance

Those response windows are yours to set, not the software's. Write them into your post orders so the guard and the dispatcher read the same word the same way. Writing post orders that work covers where that definition belongs, and a written escalation matrix covers who gets called when the window is missed.

What raises a flag

• A task due in the next fifteen minutes raises a due-soon alert
• A task past its due date raises an overdue alert
• Priority raised to urgent
• The guard says they cannot complete it

The fourth one matters more than it looks. A guard who reports they cannot do the job has given you time to reassign it. A guard who silently lets it go overdue has given you a client complaint.

Assigning the work

Method	Use when	How
Direct	One specific guard is the right person	Assign to the individual
Group	Anyone qualified can take it	Assign to the team or shift
Self-assignment	You want guards pulling work	Post it unassigned and let it be claimed
Template	It is the same job every time	Spin it up from a task template

From there the task moves through five states, and the record keeps who did what at each one.

1. Not started. Created and waiting
2. Scheduled. Parked with a date it is due to begin
3. In progress. A guard has started it, and who started it is recorded
4. Completed. Finished, with the verification it required attached
5. Cancelled. No longer needed, and still on the record

Cancelled staying on the record is deliberate. "We decided not to do it" is a defensible answer. A task that vanished is not.

Proving the task was done

Verification is the difference between a task list and a to-do list. Pick the lightest method that would satisfy the person who might question it later.

Method	What the guard does	Fits
None	Marks it complete	Low-risk, low-consequence work
Photo	Attaches a photo	Anything with a visible result
GPS	Has to be at the location	Location-specific work
NFC	Taps the tag at the location	Work a client audits
QR	Scans the code at the location	Sites where a tag is impractical

NFC is the strongest of the five because the tag cannot be photographed from the parking lot. How NFC checkpoints prove the patrol happened explains the mechanics, and the same logic applies to a task tied to a fixed point.

The completion note should say what was done, what got in the way, whether anything needs following up, and who else was involved. Four lines. A guard who writes "done" has told you nothing you can bill from or defend with.

Keeping the load even

The supervisor view answers who is drowning and what is slipping.

• All open tasks, filtered by site
• Overdue tasks
• Tasks by assignee
• Completion rate for the period, with the trend against the period before
• Which people and which sites are carrying the most activity

Watch the distribution, not just the total. The dependable guard quietly absorbs everyone else's tasks until the week they stop answering the phone. Leave real buffer for the unplanned work, because a shift booked to capacity has nowhere to put the 1am call.

Recurring tasks

A recurring task repeats hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. Each repeat can go to the same person, to whoever is on shift, or round-robin across a group. Daily equipment checks, weekly extinguisher inspections and monthly lighting audits are the obvious candidates.

Round-robin is worth using for the jobs nobody wants. It removes the argument about who did it last time.