Escalations in Business Processes
- By InfoMajesty Inc on May 2, 2012
- Posted in: Business Process Management, K2
A business process, most often, is a commitment to the stakeholders of a “timely” outcome of a request that serves a higher business purpose. In order to ensure the timliness of the outcome, a process needs to build in checks and balances to encourage process participants to perform their duties within expected timeframes. It is important to quantify these timeframes when the process is designed and enforce them via the implementation. Often, the enforcement is performed via “Escalations”.
There are typically three types of escalations in any business process – Reminders, Escalations up the management chain and Expiration. While there are many other nuanced escalations possible, these are by and large the most understood and often used.
With email reminders, users are notified (again) of any pending actions after a period of time. These are soft escalations or friendly calls to action. Reminders can also be cc’ed to higher ups to coax a user into action.
Escalations up the chain usually mean taking a task from a user after a period of time and assigning it to his or her manager. These are effective when a user fails to perform the task in a timely manner either because he or she is out of office or just missing in action.
Expiration is usually the last resort where the workflow continues to the next step. Under this scenario, the task is usually optional or not completely “mandatory” and can be marked as incomplete as the process moves on to the next step.
Other important consideration in escalations is the working calendar. If a certain task is expected to take a day and it was assigned to a user on Friday evening, escalations should factor in the weekend and escalate only on Monday evening assuming Saturday and Sunday are not part of the working calendar.