3. The Production graph

Walk through the visual explanation →

Membership is not Assignment

Membership is participation. Assignment is descriptive production work. One member can have no assignment, one assignment or several. Role, department, groups and work period belong to the description of work rather than being treated as a single permanent identity attribute.

A change from one job to another should preserve the member and person. Replacement and reporting relationships describe work and retain history. They should not silently rewrite participation or imply that the replacement inherits the original worker’s authority.

Groups organize work

A Production Group can represent a unit or working team. Generic organization avoids inventing independent lifecycle systems for every common grouping. Assignments can reference groups, and an audience can use eligible group context when targeting communication.

Generic does not mean unlimited meaning. A group is still scoped to its production. Parentage, membership and leadership are descriptive relationships. They do not automatically grant access, reporting authority or administrative permission. Department is another useful classification, not a substitute for explicit authority.

Assignment is not Task

A task is an actionable obligation: make a correction, supply a document or complete a specific action. An assignment describes the production work a person performs. Completing a task does not complete a job; changing a job does not complete every related obligation.

interface ProductionAssignmentExample {
  membershipId: string;
  roleLabel: string;
  departmentLabel?: string;
  groupIds: string[];
  reportsToAssignmentId?: string;
  replacesAssignmentId?: string;
}

This independently authored example communicates relationships. It is not an internal schema, state machine or accepted API payload.

Tradeoff

Separating participation and work introduces additional reference handling, history and projection work. It makes multiple jobs and changing work intelligible. The important acceptance question is whether the separation survives ordinary operations: replacing work, archiving a group and displaying historical context without manufacturing new people.