Managing escalations
Escalations enable you to automatically monitor critical steps in a Change process. With escalations, you can ensure that critical tasks are completed on time, change the status or owner of a record, or cause other automated actions, such as notifications, to occur. If tasks are not completed promptly, they time out, and you can use escalations to assign the tasks to other people to prevent work backlogs.
About this task
When you define an escalation, an action is automatically performed when specified conditions are met. For example, you might have an escalation that monitors schedule dates on implementation tasks; if a task is not completed by its scheduled end date, an automated warning can be triggered.
This product provides a set of predefined Change process escalations. Many of these escalations ensure that notifications are sent at critical steps in a Change. You can tailor these escalations to suit the needs of your data center, or create new ones.
For example, the product provides escalations that send e-mails to Change Owners and the owners of CIs when a Change status is modified, a CI is scheduled to be changed, a task is overdue, and a Change is transferred. These e-mails are sent frequently, and users might prefer not to receive some or all of them. The corresponding escalations are as follows:
| Escalation | Description |
|---|---|
| PMCHGACTCI | Sends notifications when CIs are scheduled to be changed |
| PMCHGWO | Sends a warning when a task is not completed by its scheduled completion date |
| PMCHGWOHST | Sends notifications when Changes are transferred |
| PMCHGWOSTA | Sends notifications when the status of a Change changes |
You can deactivate any escalation that you do not want to use; for the PMCHGWOSTA escalation, which sends e-mail every time a Change status changes, you can adjust the query so that only certain status changes trigger notifications. For instructions on performing these and other escalation-related operations, go to the Escalations application (), and click Help. You can also view help for the Escalations application in the Modules and Applications section of the information center (in the navigation pane, click ).
For a complete list of the escalations that are provided as product content, see "Escalations" in the Content section.