Topic

Escalation Process Management

Response

Designing, communicating and governing an effective and efficient Agile escalation process as part of an Agile transformation program, empowers individual Agile Teams and provides a clear view of the escalation importance, ownership and state.

When designing an effective agile escalation processes the Agile transformation team needs to incorporate the following characteristics:

A clear and concise escalation workflow, which provides guidance on when a formal escalation process should be raised. For example, type of performance challenge
Clear definition of roles and responsibilities at each stage of the escalation workflow
A suitable processes reporting mechanism, which allows the anyone within the organisation to learning about the escalation
A framework for analysing the potential financial, scope or schedule impact of the escalation. This requires the definition of pre-agreed performance tolerances
A governance council for assessing the escalation (i.e. project or product council) where the appropriate corrective measures are planned

Within an Agile team and organisation the escalation process typically starts within a team as they attempt to complete any number of tasks (user stories). In this situation, escalations typically starts-out as a blocked or impediment.

Alternatively, escalations may be triggered during any number of regular ceremonies, e.g. monthly or quarterly reviews. iteration (sprint reviews), product backlog refinement sessions. Escalations may be caused by fiscal, outcome or operational matters that require a detailed escalation process to be followed.

Ownership and Control

When designing an efficient and effective escalation management processes it is important to realise that the most successful ones - enable individual teams to retain ownership of the issue. Empowering them (teams) to take as many of the decisions as possible (i.e. retain owenrship) before requiring external intervention.

A well practiced approach is to predefine upper and lower tolerance levels and scheduling community of practice forums (Scrum of Scrums) that enable the individual owner (e.g. Scrum Master) to seek the assistance of others prior to formal escalation.

Escalation Ownership

It is important that Teams defined a series of 'hard' milestones within the escalation process to ensure they don't retain actively limit awareness.

Escalation Assessment

Each escalation needs to determine whether there is an impact on the project's fiscal, outcome or operational performance. Assessments typically focus on the short term, i.e. monthly or quarterly key performance indicators to measure impact (i.e. falls within the pre-agreed performance tolerances).

Scrum of Scrums

From time to time a Scrum Master may chose to ask for assistance or may need to bring to the attention of other Scrum Masters (i.e. where there is a dependency). In this situation, an organisation must have established a Scrum of Scrums framework.

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Additional information, including working examples and templates are available in the Monetical knowledge base.