While effective communication can be challenging in the best of circumstances, it can be especially trying when an internal or external customer is facing an issue. The first goal of the incident management process is to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. It’s important to achieve escalation management to reach this objective.
To achieve this end, there are a number of tools that IT engineers should have at their disposal in order to expedite resolution of the issue.
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According to Harvard Business Review:
The only way to keep productive energy flowing through this [email] network is for everyone to continually check, send, and reply to the multitude of messages flowing past—all in an attempt to drive tasks, in an ad hoc manner, toward completion.
Email becomes the platform where all tasks get dumped – including important IT incidents whose speedy resolution is key to keeping customers happy and the business running. As such, teams should look to communicate with their colleagues on a separate messaging application that has immediacy as well as priority settings.
Many IT teams define digital escalation as raising the priority of an issue by alerting the whole on-call group to an incident. Unfortunately, this practice often works to create alert overload. Sending alerts to everyone all the time can result in alerts being treated as noise. If the whole team is being alerted then the individual engineer is left to believe that another team member will respond to the alert. Hence, alerting the whole team fosters a culture of ignoring alerts or as one Google engineer chimed, “foo-alerts“.
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As described above, the word escalation clues us in to the need to resolve an important issue. For IT, we need to understand how to effectively communicate and raise the message priority for effective escalations to take place. IT needs to have the tools accessible which makes these escalations possible.
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