IT Fires Are Burning Your Team Out: Why You Need an Escalation Plan
It’s 3 AM—and somewhere, an IT team is already on the clock.
Whether it’s a server crash, a cybersecurity breach, or an outage that can’t wait until morning, someone’s up resolving the issue so business can run smoothly when everyone else logs on.
IT professionals have come to accept that putting out fires is just part of the job. But unclear procedures and blurry lines of communication make endless incident management feel chaotic and stressful, especially for lean teams with limited resources. When there are simply too many fires to fight, IT teams get burned out.
In this article, we’ll dig into the consequences of battling IT fires and discuss how developing an escalation plan helps teams better distribute the burden of incident management to reduce stress and improve outcomes. We’ll also talk about how to escalate incidents to a managed service provider (MSP) so you can free up your team’s time and tackle incidents more efficiently.
The Real Cost of Constant Firefighting
IT departments are under relentless pressure. You’ve probably experienced it yourself: you and your team can’t seem to make headway on that important innovation project for the business because you’re resetting passwords and responding to another system error. Your phone is lit up with alerts like you’re an ER surgeon as you field a round-the-clock firehose of issues and incidents.
And you’re definitely not alone. A survey from GoTo and OnePoll found that 58% of IT decision-makers report feeling overwhelmed. Respondents said that they’re increasingly responsible for tasks outside of their job description. Research from Pluralsight backs this up, revealing that nearly half of IT team members have taken on additional tasks due to hiring freezes at their companies. Black Frog similarly found that almost all cybersecurity leaders (98%) work at least 9 hours beyond their contract. Cybersecurity leaders that want to leave their role say that stress and increasing job demands were the main reasons they’re thinking about moving on.
In 2022, Splashtop found that 65% of IT help desk teams report that their team members experience unsustainable levels of stress. Overburdened IT team members report that they can only handle about 85% of the tickets that hit their desk each day, leaving 15% of issues sitting on the back burner.
When the IT team doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage the volume of incidents alongside business-building projects, organizations experience consequences like:
Errors or band-aid fixes that cause more incidents down the road, further taxing resources and increasing costs.
Employee burnout that leads to lower productivity, absenteeism, and turnover.
Mounting technical debt due to an inability to prioritize innovative projects.
If leaders want to leverage their investment in IT talent to drive growth, they need to get strategic about managing workloads and reducing the burden of fighting fires. One way to do this is through streamlining the incident escalation process to more effectively distribute that burden across your team—or delegate it outside your organization.
Escalation Planning 101
Escalation happens when an incident is beyond the expertise or capacity of the person who encounters an issue and they need to bring in someone more qualified or specialized to solve it. Larger organizations often have an on-call technician who’s responsible for responding to incidents when they happen. If the on-call technician isn’t capable of fixing the problem themselves, an escalation is in order.
This is where an escalation plan or policy comes in. With a strong escalation procedure, the right people are called in to handle the problems they’re most qualified to solve. A great escalation plan also proactively identifies external escalation paths IT teams can use when issues are beyond their bandwidth or skillset.
Incidents are inevitable. Smart IT teams have an escalation plan in place to orchestrate resolution without overburdening individual team members. Here’s how to get started:
1. Determine Your Escalation Path
Escalation planning starts with determining who calls whom, which is known as an escalation path. Creating an escalation path ensures that there’s no friction around communication or roles and responsibilities during incident response, mitigating chaos and speeding up time-to-resolution.
There are three common escalation paths:
Hierarchical Escalation: Incidents are passed to a person or team that is more experienced or has seniority within the organization; i.e., from a service desk technician to an IT manager.
Functional Escalation: Incidents are passed to those who have the appropriate skills or work most closely with the systems in question, rather than those who have seniority. For example, if there’s an issue with your email provider, a junior IT team member might pass that issue over to another junior team member who specializes in managing the email platform.
Automated Escalation: Incidents are automatically routed to relevant team members based on pre-defined rules within an IT service desk or ticketing platform.
All escalation paths start with whoever is on call. It’s a good idea to regularly audit your on-call schedule to ensure that the right team members are on call at the right times, and that those on call are empowered to escalate incidents appropriately when they need help. Encourage your on-call team members to see escalation as a strategic game-time decision—like passing the puck to a wide-open winger before the clock runs out—rather than as an abdication of responsibility or a personal failing.
2. Define Incident Severity Levels
Incident severity levels reflect the impact that an issue is going to have on your systems, and the business. Defining incident severity levels enables you to quickly communicate which incidents should be prioritized and who should tackle them. This ensures that junior team members aren’t slogging through issues beyond their expertise and, likewise, that your specialists aren’t wasting time churning out more menial fixes, reducing the burden on everyone.
You’ll need to define incident severity levels within the context of your organization, team structure, and software systems. Typically, severity (SEV) level 1 is considered the most severe type of incident. Here’s a quick example of what a severity level ranking framework can look like:
SEV 1: A critical incident that has a serious impact on essential systems and affects the majority of your internal users.
SEV 2: A major incident that has a significant impact on systems and internal users.
SEV 3: An incident that causes errors or minor problems for internal users.
SEV 4: A minor problem that affects systems but doesn’t have an immediate impact on users.
SEV 5: A very minor problem with a quick or routine fix.
3. Establish Relationships with External Escalation Partners
Sometimes, an incident can’t be solved by your own team and requires external escalation. Maybe you’re using a platform like Microsoft 365 and your team discovers an issue beyond their expertise or level of access that has to be addressed by the software’s support team. You’d need to escalate the issue to Microsoft customer support.
Rather than turning on the Bat-Signal and hoping that the software vendor sends someone to resolve the incident, IT teams should build close relationships with their vendor’s team to ensure they get priority support. Ideally, you’d have a designated contact on the vendor’s support team to troubleshoot and escalate your issues on their end. Depending on your service level agreement (SLA), you might not have access to a point of contact and your customer support ticket will float around with everyone else’s.
This is where looping in a managed service partner can improve the external escalation process and ensure you get the help you need in a timely manner. MSPs have a diverse team of specialists who can tackle a range of IT issues and are deeply familiar with the systems they manage for their customers. MSPs like IX Solutions act as an extension of your team and can resolve incidents in line with your protocols, on your timeline.
MSPs also often have a direct line to the software vendor’s team. If they need to escalate the incident to the vendor, they can ensure it gets priority treatment and do the work of liaising with their contact while the issue gets resolved.
4. Create an Escalation Matrix
Once you’ve selected the escalation path that makes sense for you and defined your severity levels, you can develop an escalation matrix. Like an old-school phone tree, an escalation matrix is a document that clearly states which people or teams should be called, under what circumstances, and in what order. Your escalation matrix needs to include all internal escalation paths as well as the names and contact information for your external escalation partners. It should be clear when your team needs to escalate an incident to a vendor or your MSP and who on your team is responsible for making the call and facilitating communication.
Your escalation matrix can be as simple or complex as you need it to be. The more clarity the matrix provides, the easier it is for every individual along the escalation path to take the next right step.
In addition to names and contact info, you can also add an overview of what actions should be taken at each stage of escalation. For example, you might want to outline the terms of your SLAs with your most critical vendors so that the person responsible for communicating with them knows what to expect and when to follow up. This also gives the whole team insight into what’s happening when an incident is escalated to the vendor, decreasing those “Where are we at with this?” or “Have they responded to us yet?” messages on Teams or Slack.
Here’s a sample escalation matrix:
| Level | Escalation Trigger / Criteria | Escalation Contact / Role | Response Time | Action / Responsibility |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Level 1: Frontline Support / Technician | Initial issue or incident reported by user | Helpdesk / IT Support Technician | Within 15–30 minutes | Acknowledge ticket, log incident, perform first-level troubleshooting |
| Level 2: Technical Specialist / Team Lead | Issue unresolved within SLA or requires advanced expertise | Technical Specialist / Team Lead | Within 1 hour of L1 escalation | In-depth investigation, implement workaround or fix, update incident log |
| Level 3: Department Manager / Service Owner | High-impact issue, multiple users affected, or breach of SLA | IT Manager / Service Owner | Within 2 hours of L2 escalation | Oversee RCA, coordinate resources, communicate with stakeholders |
| Level 4: Executive / Vendor / Client Stakeholder | Critical business impact, major outage, or reputational risk | Director of IT / Vendor Account Manager / Client Contact | Within 4 hours of L3 escalation | Approve major decisions, allocate resources, manage external communications if needed |
| Post-Incident Review | Once incident is resolved | IT Manager + Key Stakeholders | Within 2–3 business days | Conduct RCA, document lessons learned, update procedures and prevention plans |
Having an Escalation Plan Makes Incident Management More Manageable
Without an escalation plan, chaos ensues. Communication is reactive and fragmented as first responders don’t know who to notify or what information they should impart. Team members that need support aren’t sure where to turn and get overwhelmed trying to solve issues beyond their skillset. Issues are prioritized by recency rather than severity and higher-impact problems slip under the radar.
But, with an escalation plan in place:
Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, empowering team members to take ownership of their part in the plan.
Incidents are handled by the most capable person, which means fixes happen faster.
People work on the problems they are good at solving, leading to greater alignment, fulfillment, and reduced burnout.
Less time and energy is wasted on communication or back-and-forth about who should do what, lowering the cognitive and emotional burden of managing incidents.
Incidents can be quickly delegated to expert managed IT services teams, freeing internal team members to focus on big-picture initiatives.
Smart IT Teams Know They Don’t Have to Manage Incidents Alone
When your team is overburdened with support tickets, patch deployment, and software vendor management, calling in reinforcements lightens the load and allows you to get back to delivering business value.
Working with a managed IT service provider like IX Solutions gives you access to an extended roster of specialists who can resolve incidents that your team may not have the skills or capacity to handle. IX Solutions partners with you to seamlessly integrate the managed IT services you need into your escalation procedure, reducing your team’s IT lift without compromising on oversight and control.
IX Solutions helps IT teams build resilience through reliable escalation support and managed services so you can focus on what’s next, not what’s breaking. Get in touch with our team to learn more about how we can strengthen and streamline your escalation plan.