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Lessons · IT support · escalating a ticket

Escalation: handing it up, with everything you found

Escalation is moving a ticket to somebody with more access, more knowledge or more authority, at the moment your own runs out. Functional escalation goes to a specialist team; hierarchical escalation goes to a manager because the clock or the impact needs a decision.

Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.

What it is for

The ticket that bounced three times: desk to network, network back to desk, desk to servers, each time with the note 'please look at this'. Four days. The user was asked the same five questions by four people. One escalation with the answers written down would have been one afternoon.

How to think about it

Escalate when one of three things is true: you have hit your time box, you need access you do not have, or data is at risk. Before you press the button, write what you tried and what each check showed, pick the team by the layer the fault is in, tell the user it is going up and to whom, and then watch that somebody actually picked it up.

Worked example

Time box hit: 30 min, three checks done, not fixed
The reason to escalate, stated. Not 'I gave up'; 'the rule says now'.
Tried: cable reseated, link light on, address 10.4.2.31, ping gateway OK, ping file server times out
Each check and what it showed. The next person starts from here, not from zero.
To: server team. Why: the server does not answer from a client that reaches everything else
The team named by the layer the evidence points at.
User told: 'this is with the server team, ticket 20531, I will update you by 15:00'
The user knows where it is and when they will hear. Nobody has to ask twice.

Your turn

You need a change on the firewall and only the network team can make it. Write which kind of escalation that is.

This is a  escalation, to the network team

The trap

Escalating with 'user says it does not work'. The receiving team cannot act on that, so it comes back with 'please gather more information', and the clock kept running the whole time it was in transit.

Practise escalating a ticket on HoneA question on it now, a coding challenge where there is one, and it is remembered for review. Free, no email needed.