Let’s say you are happily working your way through your day and just before that status update meeting you need to finish this last item. You are almost there… and you hit a snag! Recall that day?

You need help. You need it now. How do you get the attention right now?

You can get help formally if you have business escalations put in place.

Escalation is a management tool. It helps managers to help employees get things done. Escalation support also helps to avoid things that could slip through the cracks.

Escalation mechanisms are very handy when you are dealing with business processes.

Business processes typically have a lot of activities and tasks. Many different groups of people will be involved in executing tasks and there could be delegations, re-assignments, re-prioritising, suspension and cancellations of tasks. All these actions could affect future activities in the same or connected business process instances.

So it is very important to have escalations in place in your business processes so that if you hit a road block, you are covered for it. If you forget something, someone will remind you, until done.

It is your insurance policy that proactively works to reduce process accidents 🙂.

By defining escalations at various levels of your business process, (activity, task, group and user) you can have fine-grained support and control. IT support ticket systems have escalation processes for this reason.

Think about how you could build escalations inside your business processes.