Write down who gets called for each kind of failure, and the calls stop coming to you by default.
I spent 33 years in enterprise IT, twenty of them as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, and I think the manager who takes every call is among the most expensive habits a company can have. It feels like dedication from the inside. From the outside it’s a company betting its overnight operations on one tired person’s phone.
Why does one person end up taking every call?
Write down who gets called for each kind of failure, and the calls stop coming to you by default.
Because deciding who to wake up is a judgment, and the judgment exists in exactly one place. Somebody calls at two in the morning. A system is down. Which system, how bad is it, who owns that area, is this the kind of thing that waits until morning, who’s on vacation this week.
Whoever holds the whole picture answers those questions. In most small companies that’s one person, and every call routes to them because no alternative path exists. The person on the receiving end usually reads this as a workload problem and tries to solve it by being more available. That makes it worse. The real constraint is the missing written rule, and every extra hour of availability just hides it longer.
What does a 24-hour operation require overnight?
The warehouses ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year, excluding Christmas and a couple of other holidays.
An operation like that needs somebody to call at three in the morning. Not somebody who might answer. Somebody whose job at that moment is to answer.
For a long stretch, that was me. Every call came to me, and I decided who to contact, who to wake up, and what could wait. Every time, for anything. I wasn’t doing anyone a favor by absorbing it. I was the single point through which every night-time decision had to pass, and a single point that needs sleep is a design flaw instead of a virtue.
How do you build an escalation process without a platform?
A form and somebody paid to follow it.
We set up a help desk, run by US Technical Services. Somebody there answered the call, worked through a routing form, and contacted the right person directly. This system failed, that system failed, here’s who gets called. Not a platform, not an on-call product, and certainly not anything with intelligence in it. A form, and a person following it at three in the morning.
I stopped being woken for every small error, and the person who could fix the problem got the call first and not second.
I loved that form. It was the least impressive piece of technology we had, and I’d put it up against any on-call product sold today.
What goes in an IT escalation form?
Less than people expect.
The failure types you see in practice. That’s a shorter list than anyone believes before they write it down. Who owns each one. Who gets called if that person doesn’t answer. What can wait until morning and what cannot.
Nothing else goes in, and it fits on a page. The hard part is admitting how few distinct situations there really are, because the person holding the judgment experiences each night as unique.
They’re not unique. Most on-call decisions repeat, and the exceptions are rare enough that a form can say escalate to the manager for anything not listed.
Who should answer the phone at three in the morning?
Somebody whose job it is, instead of somebody who happens to be reachable.
Those are different arrangements. A person who’s paid to answer, has the routing form in front of them, and does this every night will handle a call better than a senior engineer who was asleep and is now trying to remember who covers what.
For a company that can’t staff an overnight desk, the same principle applies to whoever is on duty. Give them the form. What matters is that the routing got decided in advance, while everyone was awake and thinking clearly. What this changes is subtle. The technical people stop being the first line and become the second, and they get called only when the call is theirs. That single change is most of what makes on-call survivable.
What does being the bottleneck cost a company?
More than the sleep, and the other costs are the ones nobody counts.
Every call routed through one person adds delay, because the call reaches a hop before it reaches a fixer. At two in the morning that delay is the difference between an incident and an outage. The people on the floor feel that delay first. They’re standing next to a dead system at three in the morning while the call works its way through a hop to somebody who can fix it, and the business is losing the night’s work the whole time. It also means nobody else learns to make the decision. The judgment stays in one head, and the longer it stays there the harder it becomes to write down, because the person holding it stops noticing they’re applying rules at all.
And it hides the pattern. When one person absorbs everything, nobody sees that the same three systems generate most of the calls, because there’s no record. A routing form creates one as a byproduct.
My take
If every call comes to you, the problem is the rule that lives in your head. Write it down. It fits on one page. List the failure types you see, who owns each, who’s next if they don’t answer, and what can wait until morning. Then hand the form to whoever is on duty. I waited longer than I should have to do this, and you don’t have to.
What escalation rules should a manager write down first?
The last ten calls you took, and who should have taken each one.
That exercise takes an hour and produces the first draft of the form. Most people are surprised by how much repetition appears, and by how many of those calls had an obvious owner nobody contacted. Then add the two or three cases that really are yours. Those exist and they should be named, because a form that pretends the manager is never needed will be ignored the first time it’s wrong. The goal is to be called for the ones that need you, and that turns out to be a small fraction of what currently arrives. I think a manager who keeps every call because it feels good to be needed is hurting the company and their own people, and I’d tell them to write the form this week.
Management books written from the outside in leave you managing the way you did before. Street-Smart Management Wisdom puts you in the hero’s seat with guides who have faced the same problems.
