Change Management: How To Migrate Tools With Losing Escalation Context
Your network operations team escalates a P1 ticket to infrastructure. The infrastructure team lead opens it twenty minutes later and sees a ticket created that morning with three comments, none of which explain why it’s now urgent or what the network team already tried. She pings the original engineer on Slack: “What’s the actual issue here?” He’s confused; he added a detailed handoff comment before escalating the ticket. The problem? It’s in the old system. She’s looking at the new one.
This happens constantly during and after tool migrations. Escalation paths exist in your documentation and your org chart, but the actual context for individual tickets disappears in the gap between System A and System B. You end up with tickets that move between teams while losing the thread of what’s actually wrong.
Most migration guides treat this as a data problem: mapping fields, importing history, training users. But escalation context isn’t just data. It’s the accumulated understanding of who touched this issue, what they ruled out, why they sent it to you, and what they need back. When that context breaks during migration, your escalation process becomes a game of telephone played across two different phone systems.
Why escalation context vanishes during migrations
You notice the problem in your daily standup. Your tier-two team mentions they’re getting escalations without enough information. Your tier-three team says they’re redoing work that tier-two already completed. Both teams blame the new tool: “the interface is confusing” or “fields are in different places.” When you dig in, you find something else. The information exists. It’s just not in the right system.
During parallel-run periods, escalation paths cross system boundaries. A ticket originates in your legacy platform because that’s what the service desk still uses. The team that needs to resolve it works exclusively in the new platform because you migrated their queue two weeks ago. The escalation happens through a software integration that moves the ticket from A to B. Technically, it works. The ticket appears in the right queue with the right priority. The status syncs back when they close it.
What doesn’t sync is why this ticket matters right now, what the customer already told the first responder, which solutions failed, or what the business impact is beyond the severity label. These things exist in comments, in custom fields that don’t map perfectly, in attachments with diagnostic logs, in related tickets that reference each other. Your integration moved the ticket. It didn’t move the story.
The service desk engineer who escalated it assumes the context transferred. The infrastructure engineer who received it assumes anything important would be in the description field. Both are wrong. The escalation happened, but the handoff failed. The infrastructure engineer either works from incomplete information or cycles back to ask questions that were already answered. Your mean time to resolution climbs even though your team is doing exactly what you trained them to do.
Standard integrations weren’t designed for this. They sync data: field values, status changes, priority levels. They don’t preserve the narrative of what happened and why someone escalated. That’s the gap where your escalations break during migrations.
Treating your integration as a temporary escalation system
Here’s the reframe most IT teams miss: your software integration isn’t temporary infrastructure you tolerate until you finally switch off the system you’re migrating from. It’s your escalation system during the transition. Everything routes through it. If it doesn’t preserve context, your escalation process breaks regardless of how well you’ve planned the migration.
Documentation from integration vendors treats them as a band-aid, syncing data and maintaining basic workflows until your migration is done. What isn’t documented is how to preserve escalation context across that integration. You need more than just basic field mappings. You need three critical capabilities that most integrations don’t provide.
Context preservation (not just data sync)
Your integration needs to recognize when a ticket is being escalated, not just moved. When your network team escalates to infrastructure, that’s different from a new ticket. Someone already worked on it. They made a deliberate decision to hand it off. The receiving team needs to see that decision and understand the reasoning behind it.
Create escalation context documentation that assembles understanding from multiple sources: who worked on this previously, what actions they took, what they ruled out, why they’re escalating it now, and what specific question they need answered. This isn’t just copying comments chronologically. It’s a structured summary that the receiving team sees immediately when they open the ticket.
The engineer opening an escalated ticket in the new system shouldn’t have to hunt for context. It should be visually distinct—highlighted at the top, formatted consistently, clearly labeled as handoff information. Some teams use a dedicated “Escalation Summary” field. Others configure their bridge to post context as the first comment with a distinctive format that engineers recognize instantly.
Attachments and diagnostic data need special handling. If the network engineer attached packet captures before escalating, those files need to reach the infrastructure engineer. Not just a note saying “see attached”—the actual files. Your bridge should verify attachment transfer and alert someone if it fails. The receiving team gets the artifacts, not just references to artifacts they can’t access.
Links between tickets matter too. If this escalation relates to other tickets or if it’s a recurring issue with history, those relationships should transfer. Dead links to tickets that the receiving team can’t access create confusion and force them to start investigations from scratch.
Ownership clarity during dual-system operation
The biggest non-technical challenge during migration is ownership ambiguity. Some teams have migrated, some haven’t. Some tickets span both groups. Who owns what, and who’s responsible when something falls through the crack between systems?
Define ownership based on where the work happens, not where the ticket lives. If a ticket exists in System A but the team doing the work uses System B, System B is the source of truth for status, progress, and resolution. System A becomes a read-only view for anyone who hasn’t migrated yet.
Your integration configuration should enforce this with sync directionality. During the work phase, updates flow from System B to System A only. When the ticket returns to a System A team, the directionality reverses. This prevents conflicts where both systems show different statuses and nobody knows which is true.
Create a responsibility matrix: which system owns each action during the transition period. The service desk creates tickets in System A. The network team works in System A and can escalate to teams in either system. The infrastructure team works in System B exclusively. Your integration configuration should match this matrix. Don’t set up bidirectional sync everywhere and hope teams figure it out.
You need a dedicated integration operator: someone who monitors the integration, investigates sync failures, and handles edge cases. This isn’t IT support’s job or the migration team’s job. It’s a dedicated responsibility during the transition period. When an escalation fails to transfer properly, the integration operator catches it before it turns into a dropped ticket. When context gets lost, they retrieve it manually and document what went wrong.
Your integration operator also handles orphaned tickets: tickets that exist in both systems but with divergent states. This happens when sync fails intermittently or when someone manually recreates a ticket because they couldn’t find it in their system. The integration operator reconciles these, decides which is canonical, and merges the history.
Monitoring that catches escalation failures
Standard integration monitoring tracks sync success rates and error logs. That’s not enough. Syncs might succeed technically while losing comments or attachments. You need monitoring that verifies the full handoff worked. That monitoring should track these metrics.
| Metric | What it tells you | When to act |
| Escalation completion rate | How many escalations reach the receiving team with context intact | Below 95% means context is getting lost |
| Escalation delays | Time gap between reassignment and receiving team touching the ticket | More than 30 minutes means notifications aren’t working |
| Escalation loops | Tickets bouncing between same teams repeatedly | Tickets bouncing between the same teams repeatedly |
| Orphaned tickets | Tickets existing in both systems with divergent states | Immediate reconciliation needed |
Set alerts for escalations that sit in “New” status in the destination system for more than thirty minutes. That’s your signal that the handoff failed even though sync succeeded. The ticket didn’t appear in the right queue, the notification didn’t fire, or the receiving team doesn’t recognize it as escalated.
Build a dashboard showing integration health from an escalation perspective: escalations in flight, escalations with missing context, escalation bouncebacks, and escalation abandonments. Review this daily during the transition period. It tells you whether your integration is actually working or just technically functioning.
You also need qualitative monitoring: regular check-ins with teams using the integration. They’ll tell you about problems metrics don’t catch. Fields that technically sync but aren’t useful. Notifications that arrive but don’t provide enough context. Handoffs that work but feel awkward. This feedback drives configuration improvements throughout the transition period.
Making the integration operational, not just technical
The transition window is where most migrations either succeed or fail quietly. Your migration might complete technically, while your escalation paths break in practice because context doesn’t transfer, ownership becomes ambiguous, or monitoring doesn’t catch handoff failures.
Focus your migration energy on the transition period, powered by your integration. Not just the destination state. Design your strategy before you migrate the first team. If you’re already mid-migration and escalations are breaking, treat the integration as your primary system right now. It is. Everything else connects to it.
Configure it with the same care you’d give a permanent system. Make sure it recognizes escalations and preserves context, not just field values. Establish clear ownership rules that follow where work happens. Assign someone to monitor it who can catch failures before they cascade into dropped tickets.
Set up automated testing of common escalation paths. Create test tickets, escalate them, and verify they arrive with context intact. Do this weekly or after any integration configuration change. Automated testing catches regressions before they affect real work.
The technology for connecting systems exists. Platforms like Unito can help you synchronize tickets between systems during migration while maintaining bidirectional updates and preserving context through comment syncing and field-level control. The missing piece is usually recognizing that you’re not just connecting systems—you’re maintaining an escalation process across a deliberate, temporary discontinuity.
Treat it as the operational challenge it is, and your migration will maintain the workflows that actually keep services running. Your teams will barely notice the transition because the handoffs that matter keep working even as the underlying systems change.
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