Parallel process and pop up notifications

Hi all,

Anyone know of a good way to run prework notifications / work process / workdone notifications ? 

Need to run prework notifications and work process in parallel.

I am using either new-object -comobject wscript.shell or [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms") as the basis for my visual notification.  (pop up box or systray bubble)  Followed by a start-process statement.

Wrapping either of these in a Var and kicking off via Start-job doesn't seem to work well. 

thanks all