What are the situations in a workflow that require escalation?

Hi Bashar,

You can have escalations at three levels:  process, activity, and event.  The main use of escalations is to implement a business rule.   Here are some customer examples I have encountered:

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• Once started, the process must complete within three hours or the administrator must be notified.  [process]
  
  
• If the committee doesn’t complete voting by 5PM the following Monday, set the committee outcome to ‘declined’. [activity]
  
  
• If any of the destination users do not take an action in 1 hour, send them a reminder email;  any destination who does not take action in three hours should have their action set to ‘reject’. [event]

You could also use them for the type of technical situations you describe.  It is very common that developers are worried about the performance an application and they spend a great deal of effort squeezing every millisecond out of code.  However, for process oriented applications, the slowest part of the system is the human being.  They get assigned a task and they forget about it.   They receive a critical task when they took an unexpected day off.

Escalations are a very important part of any process.  Often new customers don’t realize the power of escalations until they deploy their first workflow and they wait a very long time because someone forgot about a task assignment.  My advice is to start considering them at the beginning when discovering the business process.

David