GRIDSCAN moved onto the unified tasking fabric in November as the first application to migrate. Six months and two survey cycles later, an account of it.
What did not break: the customer-facing vocabulary. GRIDSCAN still speaks about corridors, spans and clearance, and no customer had to learn a new mental model. That was the design goal and it held.
What broke: our own assumptions about tasking priority. GRIDSCAN surveys are large, planned months ahead and tolerant of a few days' delay. TIDEWATCH storm-surge tasking is small, unplanned and intolerant of any delay. Putting them in one queue without a priority model meant a scheduled corridor survey could delay an alert acquisition, which we caught in staging and would not have predicted on paper.
The fix was a preemption model with published priority classes, which is now documented so that customers can see where their tasking sits.
What surprised me: consolidation made the quality model better. Previously each application had its own quality thresholds that had drifted apart over years. Reconciling them forced a conversation that should have happened in 2019.
TIDEWATCH migrates in September. AGRISENSE follows in early 2027.