How to Develop an Escalation Plan

When customers feel that they need to get a better or quicker response they may want to escalate an issue. Internally a project team member may feel that a problem requires going to a higher level of management. Escalation Plans provide the process to address this type of situation.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• MS Word

1. Read the project scope documents to make sure that the process you develop is consistent with any contract, legal agreement or Statement of Work requirements. This is important as some contracts already contain defined escalation processes for specific types of issues.
2. Make sure the process being set up does not conflict with any guidelines already established by the company you work for. For example there may be an escalation process for human resource issues already in place.
3. Develop an organization chart for your project.
4. Designate who can act on behalf of the Project Manager when that individual is not available.
5. Designate who the customer can go to on the project team for technical issues.
6. Ask your manager who would be contact point if customer wanted to go another level of management.
7. In MS Work create an Escalation Matrix with the following steps.  For technical issues on the project go to (name the individual who is your technical expert)
    In the absence of the Project Manager (name the individual) is authorized to act on her behalf.
    If the response from the Project Manager is not satisfactory please contact (name the individual) who will respond in a timely manner.
8. Distribute the Escalation Matrix to the customer’s project team.

Tips & Warnings

• When projects have a formal Project Plan the Communications Sub Plan may include a section that addresses the escalation process.