Escalation paths documented

Severity: Recommended

When the on-call person can't resolve an issue alone, they need to know who to escalate to. Clear paths prevent "who do I call?" panic during incidents.

Check automatically:

1. Look for escalation documentation:

# Search for escalation docs
grep -riE "escalat|tier|level.*support|who.*to.*call" docs/ runbooks/ README.md CLAUDE.md --include="*.md" 2>/dev/null

# Check incident management tool configs for escalation policies
grep -riE "escalation.*policy|escalation_policy" terraform/ .github/ --include="*.tf" --include="*.yml" 2>/dev/null

Ask user:

• "If the on-call engineer can't fix it, who do they call?"
• "Are there different escalation paths for different systems (database vs app vs infra)?"
• "Is there a 'wake the CTO' threshold defined?"

Cross-reference with:

• IR-001 (on-call rotation) - escalation starts from on-call
• IR-003 (contact list) - escalation needs contact info
• IR-004 (incident management tool) - often manages escalation policies

Pass criteria:

• Written escalation path (Tier 1 → Tier 2 → management)
• Clear criteria for when to escalate
• Contact info for each tier

Fail criteria:

• No escalation path ("figure it out")
• Escalation exists but criteria undefined (when do you escalate?)
• Single tier only - nowhere to go if stuck

Evidence to capture:

• Location of escalation documentation
• Number of escalation tiers
• Criteria for escalation (severity-based, time-based, etc.)

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