The path from chaos to control

During a major failure, a business can lose $100,000 a minute, according to Contingency Research, and spend tens of thousands of dollars in salaries for the people involved in working to correct the failure. The damage to a company’s long-term profitability goes beyond the immediate revenue loss to affect future revenues based on credibility, perceived reliability, trust and the overall image in the collective mind of the user community. 

Effective escalation process management minimizes the damage done by the inevitable failures that will occur in any network by turning chaos into control.

The Bottom Line  

No company is immune to crises. The critical issue is the manner in which those inevitable crises are handled: the choice is chaos or control. When disaster strikes, the immediate situation is chaos, confusion and uncertainty. The prime objective of escalation process management is to restore control to the company as quickly as possible. 

In any disaster scenario, control is about two issues:

• Effective management processes (EMP), and

• Efficient and reliable communications (ERC).

EMP + ERC = C

The quality of the management processes and communications will determine whether the “C” in the equation will be Chaos or Control.  The book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, states that: “Operationally Excellent Companies run themselves like the Marine Corps:…Everybody knows the battle plan and the rule book, and when the buzzer sounds, everyone knows exactly what he or she has to do.”  That level of planning, effective management processes and excellent communications ensures Control rather than Chaos, in spite of the events that happen.

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What is Escalation Management?

Many think that a notification system that will page someone a number of times and then page someone else is an escalation management system. Navigation from one individual to the next is a component of escalation management, but it is in no way escalation management in and of itself.

Escalation management is established for the purpose of resolution and risk mitigation during service interruptions in the supply chain.  Escalation management is the execution of designed action strategies based on a closed loop methodology (EPM) that provides support for event control, resource navigation and process confirmation throughout all levels in the organization.

It means defining a unique strategy for any given event based on the current status of that event. This includes navigation from person to person during the event, as well as changing the message sets and the contact targets during the event. Each contact target demands a different level of information to contribute to the solution or productively survive the interruption.

Escalation management embraces all entities in the supply chain that are affected by an event. These include customers, vendors, management, sales, politicians (corporate image managers) and technicians (fixers). Considering the economic impact of service interruptions today, everyone must be brought into the event loop as soon as possible with meaningful and personally relevant information. 

Paging and e-mailing alone do not achieve this objective effectively. Therefore, using the existing methods of escalation process management leave little hope for truly and cost effectively meeting service level agreements (SLAs) within a service level management program.

Building Effective Programs

As illustrated in Figure 1, there are three important areas that must be addressed:

1. Identification and control of events;

2. Development of action strategies and process control; and

3. Resource navigation and communications management.

Figure 1 Event identification & Management
EVENT SOURCE--->	EVENT CONTROL--->	ACTION STRATEGIES <----->	RESOURCE NAVIGATION
NMS & Apps	Filter	Restoration Strategies	Contact
	Analyze	Correlate	Locate
FUNCTIONS People Processes Technologies	FUNCTIONS Type Severity Time Volume	FUNCTIONS Severity Response Message Content Feedback Control Escalation Path	FUNCTIONS Group Date & Time Person Device Message Format Feedback

The following set of questions help focus the planning effort necessary to address the key areas:

• What might happen?

• What should we do if it does happen?

• Who is needed and how do we get them the right information if it does happen?

Planning and preparation are the keys to Control.  It is essential to understand what crisis events could happen and what should be done if each crisis event occurs.  This is a big job, but by applying some logic to it, generic groupings of events that will be treated similarly, for example, loss of billing data from a switch, can be created. 

Identification and Control of Events

Events can be identified by people, processes or technologies.  Notification of events by one of these sources triggers a filtering process to understand specifically what has happened, its severity and the consequences. This means that one needs to understand:

• What happened?

• How serious is it?

• What is the impact?

• Who and how many are affected?

Action Strategies and Process Control

An action plan must exist for every failure possibility.  The action plan is based on a thorough understanding of the scope and impact of the failure.  The action strategy to deal with a specific event addresses the target audience that must deal with the implications of the event, from a single technician for a minor problem to a cast of hundreds for a major disaster like a hurricane or terrorist attack. Technicians, managers, public relations, customer service, sales and engineering all could be involved for a major event.

Different action strategies can be selected based on differing severities and consequences. For example, when one router fails, the maintenance center needs to know that this router connects your customer order center to your customer database and to the order entry system, and that you will be unable to accept or process new customer orders until it gets fixed, while a different router may handle only your internal e-mail traffic.  The consequences and thus the action plan associated with the failures of each should be different.

Once the severity of the event and its consequences are understood, the Maximum Response Time (MRT) to resolve the problem is defined in the planning phase.  When the event actually occurs, the MRT clock is started and every minute is critical.  

The MRT clock doesn’t stop until confirmation of resolution is provided to all of the affected individuals.  Resolution confirmation is absolutely critical to effective escalation management.  Until confirmation has been received, the trouble still exists, at least in the minds of the carrier's customers or a regulatory body such as a Public Service Commission.

Your customers’ ability to deliver quality service to their customers now depends on the services guaranteed by your SLAs.

Resource Navigation

The key to resolving the event is to identify who must be involved at each stage of the resolution process, what information they need and how to most effectively contact them to supply them with their mission-critical information. The information that the technician needs contains detailed technical information about the event.  

The managers need to know the scope of the event, who is working on it, whether there are any unanticipated problems, whether there are any additional resources that are needed to resolve the problem, who is affected and when the problem is expected to be resolved.  The public relations manager needs to know the high level description of the problem, its scope, its expected resolution time and who/ how many are affected.  Each participant's mission-critical information must be customized to meet that participant's particular needs.  

Furthermore, the timeliness of the information differs among the participants and even for a single participant, the timeliness of the information differs depending upon the severity of the event.  A minor problem may be added to a work list for next week’s scheduled trip to a remote location, while a major problem could generate a wireless phone call at 3 a.m.  

That same major problem at noon might generate a landline call, e-mail and fax because the technician was in a location where wireless phones don’t work.  Depending upon the severity of a specific event and its consequences, different people will need to be involved in managing and resolving the event.  If a cable is cut that affects a major financial services or trading location at 3 a.m. on a Saturday, the people involved would be, and should be, different from those involved if it were to happen at 9 a.m. on a Monday.

This concept of linking the event severity to the communications device used to contact the individual is called Device Proximity Rating™ (DAP).  The use of the DAP metric ensures that the right information gets to the right people at the right time, taking into account event severity, consequences, personnel availability, location and desired contact methods.

The Device and Proximity Table in Figure 2 is the measuring tool that provides the framework for evaluating all contact devices based on where they are and how they are used within an Action Strategy.  The cells showing the most logical match of the device to its proximity to the event source is shaded.  

Figure 2 DAP Rating Table
Active Contact			Passive Contact
Category	Unassisted Voice Conversation	Device Assisted Voice  wireless phone, telephone	Signaling  Two-way pager	Brief Text Alpha pager	Full Text  fax
Proximity	0	1	2	3	4
Audible - 0
Immediate -1
General - 2
Remote - 3

The table also makes an important distinction between active and passive devices.  Passive devices provide no guarantee that the desired recipient will in fact receive the message at all, much less within a specified time frame.  For severe events, relying on passive devices is not prudent.  Similarly, spending large sums of money equipping and mandating that people carry pagers may not be the best communications management plan.

In the context of a specific event, efficient resource navigation addresses:

• Who should be involved?

• What information do they need?

• How time critical is the information?

• Is a response required or desired?

• How should they be contacted?

Effective planning, coupled with three measures: event identification and control; action strategies and process control; and resource navigation, deliver the objective of escalation process management, which is Control.  Planning and Control enable SLAs to be established with confidence.

A different world Unfortunately we have reached a time where our businesses may come under attack from more than just our competition. In some cases, more than customers and revenue will be at stake. Our ability to know how to find people and keep our operations running will make the difference. Corporations must construct operations that are resilient. Effectively meeting this challenge means being more creative and exercising every tool at our disposal. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans are now as important to the supply chain as ordering, delivery and billing systems were before September 11th. We are going to have to test, retest and maintain our Business Continuity Plans as though they will be put into action in the next hour. As communication and process specialists, we understand that Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies were tested to their very limits in wake of the devastation in New York and Washington D.C. Now, the task at hand is to make sure as a business community we are universally prepared to handle the new challenges of staying in business. Our resolve must be focused on securing the gates of America’s future and that will be accomplished through preparation. Corporate profitability is gambled every day on supply chain stability.  That risk is unacceptably high now and attention must be paid to bulletproofing our key business processes. We are fully aware that in business the connection between people, process and technology is fragile. These processes must be fortified with restoration strategies and short-term alternatives that can be implemented quickly. Establishing key business process defenses requires the business community to understand precisely who and what makes key business processes successful and how to keep them working, when everything else isn’t.  Business Continuity Management, Risk Level Evaluations, Cycle Time Assessment and Personnel Location Management are critical elements of that understanding and they require a measurable, structured methodology.

Why Do You Care?

Competition is continually increasing and success depends on having a sustainable competitive advantage.  In an era when technology is, or is becoming, a commodity that is available to all companies, competitive advantage can best be built upon the quality of service (QoS) provided to the customer.  his includes both the technical quality of the service and the quality of the customer experience every time he or she deals with representatives of your company--service representatives, maintenance centers, billing inquiries.

More and more customers are demanding SLAs to guarantee the quality of the services being delivered to them. Your customers’ ability to deliver quality service to their customers now depends on the services guaranteed by your SLAs.  Customers need your best efforts to keep your services working and they need you to let them know in a timely manner when those services aren’t performing as agreed upon.   

The key metrics that are of concern to the customer are:

• provisioning time

• up time

• restoration time

• performance throughput and 

• dependability.  

When your delivery against any of those metrics falls below expectations, your customer probably will want three things:

• Notification;

• Correction; and

• Compensation.

That may be stated as, “Tell me when something is wrong and when it will be fixed, get it fixed when you said you would, and compensate me for not delivering the service that I paid for.”

Organizational and process issues are top challenges to implementing and improving service level management (SLM).  One concern is whether the Maximum Response Times (MRTs) promised by the SLAs are achievable. If the MRT is 2 hours, the initial problem identification, technician identification, contact and response should take no more than 36 minutes.  

If you are taking longer on the front end of the problem, then your technicians likely have insufficient time to determine the real trouble source, get there, localize the problem, repair it and notify appropriate personnel that the problem has been cleared.

Effective escalation management means that management has more time to control the situation and the technical personnel have more time for repair.

It's All About Time and Control

Effective escalation management means that management has more time to control the situation and the technical personnel have more time for repair.  It means efficient control of resources.  Existing knowledge can be captured, shared and perpetuated, instead of having pieces disappear whenever someone gets promoted, changes jobs or leaves the company.  

It allows existing investments in contact devices to be made more effective and it improves your ability to efficiently manage resources during an event, e.g., having people camp on a conference bridge during an event may not be the most efficient use of everyone’s time.

Effective escalation management requires measurements to assess and automate processes.  Understanding potential failure events, planning for their eventual occurrence, measurement of the processes and automation of appropriate elements of the processes, brings with it a measure of Control. 

The effective use of escalation management will be a deciding factor in determining which service providers maintain a real competitive advantage as the level of competition continues to increase. 
Robert L. Fike is Principal & Co-Founder, LinkIndigo, Inc. He can be reached at rfike@linkindigo.com. Jeff King is President & CEO, Global Message Systems Corp., Englewood, CO.

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