11/26/2020 Not all IT incidents are created equal: How to manage escalations - TechRepublic

Not all IT incidents are created equal: How to manage

escalations
by Ant Pruitt in Tech & Work on October 17, 2016, 10:15 AM PST

IT requests range in severity and priority, but sometimes support incidents must be escalated
for the sake of the user and the company.

Image: Ant Pruitt/TechRepublic

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One of your users is frustrated with IT because their sticky S key is making the morning data
entry difficult and nobody has shown up to fix it. Another user needs to send a proposal to a
prospect and Excel refuses to save the formulas. Frustrating, ill-timed moments like these will
happen in everyone's day-to-day enterprise computing, and it's up to the IT support staff to
prioritize just how soon each issue can be addressed and resolved. The IT incident
management hierarchy may not be the most popular in your organization, but it can definitely
aid in optimal information systems performance.

All IT incidents are important

Yes, all IT incidents are important--to a certain extent. Enterprise IT does a good job of
creating service level agreements (SLAs) that set expectations on when and how IT support
incidents and requests are handled. Typically, there's a rating decision tree
(https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-consultant/adopt-this-flowchart-to-simplify-triage/) that relates to the level
of severity. For example, priority-1 is the most severe and priority-5 is the least. Incidents
affecting the whole enterprise or that are publicly facing are definitely the highest priority.
Anything below these high priority incidents or requests are defined in the SLAs.

The problems come when end users demand that their issues to be escalated to a higher
priority.

SEE: How to go beyond the reboot to provide topnotch tech support

(https://www.techrepublic.com/article/going-beyond-the-reboot-as-it-support/)

My IT incident Is REALLY important

An escalation request happens when someone asks that a logged IT incident is granted a
higher priority to gain a quicker resolution. Sure, a user's IT incident may be super important
to them, but it may not warrant escalation above other incidents being worked by IT. The
discussion of escalations can bring about tension between the IT department and users. It
may even bring tension within the IT department because of workloads.

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11/26/2020 Not all IT incidents are created equal: How to manage escalations - TechRepublic

The escalation process can turn into a battle of egos if you're not careful. Everyone feels their
problem is more important than anyone else's. Sometimes, IT has to be the bad guy and
challenge those egos for the sake of efficiency and for the enterprise. Let's take a look at a
few typical support incidents submitted each day.

The broken mouse incident

A requester is having issues with the mouse

tracking successfully on their screen. This is
making it difficult to drill into cells on a
spreadsheet. Frustration is high and the
requester demands the mouse be replaced
immediately--insisting on escalation.

IT support sees this request and can

empathize. But there is protocol to address
Image: iStockphoto.com/Minerva Studio
before issuing a new mouse. Is the mouse
properly connected to the computer? Is the
mouse on a fancy wood grained desk pattern not allowing the light to properly sense
position? Has the computer been rebooted?

Most of the time, the mouse issue can be resolved by following those troubleshooting steps.
No need to stop a technician from what they're doing and force them to run up four flights of
stairs and hand deliver a mouse.

"But Ant, this is the CEO of the company who needs a new mouse."

In that case, you might escalate the incident because of the corporate hierarchy. Yeah, I know
that the CEO is just another human who puts their trousers on one leg at a time like the rest of
us. But there comes an inherent amount of respect for the company's fearless leader that
says, "We better keep the CEO happy."

See: Support when you don't really have a help desk (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/support-
when-you-dont-really-have-a-help-desk/)

I hate the printer

Sometimes, low priority incidents can be escalated. It all depends upon the situation at hand.
For example, printer maintenance. Printers are not the favorite items in any office. They jam

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11/26/2020 Not all IT incidents are created equal: How to manage escalations - TechRepublic

more often than actually printing, they make a lot of noise and sometimes they take up a lot of
space. A user sends a print job to the printer closest to their cubicle, and the printer jams.
They clear the jam, resend the print job and the printer jams again. Frustrated, the user
notifies IT and prints at a different printer in the interim. Several hours pass and the printer is
still out of order. By now, the user and other users are unhappy with IT as no one has
attempted to resolve the issue and inconvenienced several colleagues.

Is this an escalation? Yes. Sure the colleagues can easily print to a different printer, but IT
should have at least acknowledged the original request to let users know when or if the issue
could be resolved soon. This is probably mentioned in the SLA anyway.

The automatic escalation

There are times when a request for IT support comes in and it's a "Stop what you're doing"
request. Clients report an HTTP 500 status error
(https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204644990/why-am-i-getting-a-500-internal-server-error-message)
on the website, the corporate payroll system goes offline, the phone system fails. All of these
are examples of immediate escalation requests. No one across the enterprise will argue
against support for related issues of this magnitude. But even though these incidents may
seem obvious, they should still be a part of the documented SLAs for the company.

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11/26/2020 Not all IT incidents are created equal: How to manage escalations - TechRepublic

Your take
Though the escalation process can sting an ego or two, it puts the interest of the company
and the user first. It allows IT to resolve incidents more efficiently and keep the end users
happy.

Do you have an escalation procedure in place? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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By Ant Pruitt
Ant Pruitt is an IT Support Professional with a passion for showing the non-geek how great
technology can be. He writes for a variety of tech publications and hosts his own podcast.
Ant is also an avid photographer and weight lifter.

TECH & WORK TECH INDUSTRY CXO SMBS INNOVATION DEVELOPER TECH & WORK ON ZDNET

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