Purpose of "Escalated" in Workflow?

[Robert Werner]

This is one of the standard workflows that comes with Jira Service Desk:

I'm trying to figure out why "Escalated" is included.  What purpose does it serve?  If it were removed, one could still go from "Waiting For Support" to "In Progress" in one hop rather than two.

Could someone provide me a use case where the inclusion of "Escalated" is necessary?

Thanks,

Robert

[Matt Doar · Accepted solution]

Workflow design often starts from the question "what reports do you need to be able to create?". (And before that, "how will this report improve what your organization does?") 

So someone wanted to be able to run a JQL query to see which issues were blocked in some way. Or how many issues were moved into the Escalated status in a certain week (with the "was" or changed" operators)

A custom field could also have been used, as in the Flagged feature of Jira agile boards.

[Matt Doar]

By "someone" I mean the Atlassian JSD PM team I guess.

[Robert Werner]

Thanks, Matt.  In my company, we're planning on having Tier 1 and Tier 2 support.  The general notion is that if the Tier 1 agent can completely resolve the customer's request on their own, then there's no need to disturb anyone at a Tier 2 level.

Might this be an example of why one would:

• Transition directly to In Progress (Tier 1 only)
• Transition to In Progress via Escalate (Tier 2 required)

Curious on your thoughts.

[Matt Doar]

Yes, that's a good example of using such a status in a Jira workflow. Then the Tier 2 people define JSD queues that check for that status