Escalation process

Escalation process sometimes escalation procedure is the process of resolving conflicts or routine situations which needs to be resolved. Escalation is typically used when is not possible to solve a situation at the lower level of control, so it is necessary to move the resolution to a higher level of management or expertise.

When and why is the escalation process used?

For reasons of division of labor division and efficiency of work a Responsibility responsibility} and a competence is split to different levels of management or expertise. For example, a telephone operator handles routine situations. From time to time, however, the unexpected situation occurs and operator can not handle it and move it to someone who has either the appropriate** authority** or the appropriate expertise. This is what the escalation process means. When the situation can not be solved at the level of its origin or it is unexpected or requires someonemore experienced. The advantage of the escalation is that senior people are not burden with routine situations as they are handled on a lower level.

Typical situations where the escalation process is used are:

• Customer support - typically the exceptional situations are addressed by experts at the second or third level of the support (see Support levels)
• Conflicts in resource allocation and management - for example, when one expert is required to participate on multiple projects at the same time. The resource conflict must be decided on senior / line level.
• Requirements beyond the budget
• Requirements beyond the project or task deadline
• Unexpected or extraordinary incidents can trigger escalation or even crisis management

What is important to manage the escalation process?

The escalation process, of course, requires well-described processes and competences of each levels - whether at the level of competencies or the Expertise expertise}. Therefore a precise description is needed what is being processed on the first level and which situations are escalated to higher levels. At the same time, it is important to keep everyone informed, keep processes transparent and communicate clearly the case. In this respect, there is a lot of various systems and applications to help to keep everything under control and smooth flow. Typically, various ticketing systems, workflow systems, helpdesks, service desks, CRM solutions, and so on are used.