Separate action completion from ownership completion

A workflow’s final scheduled action must not automatically terminate ownership when the owner still has reactive duties. Persist the action receipt to suppress repeat sends, but retain ownership until authoritative progress or an explicit handoff condition occurs. Exclude completed scheduled work from candidate scans so retained conversations cannot starve fresh work. Any fallback release must recheck ownership under the same lock used by assignment creation; dashboard projections should derive from that durable assignment, not infer handoff from the action receipt alone.

Applies when: A worker sends bounded proactive actions but continues handling inbound replies or later state changes. Keywords: workflow ownership follow-up idempotency queue starvation assignment race dashboard