What is the goal of incident management? It aims to reduce the negative impact of an incident on business operations by restoring things to normal as quickly as possible. The result is better levels of service quality. But beyond that, incident management that is well-thought out offers the company who is implementing an incident managment system with 5 major benefits:
- Increased efficiency and productivity throughout the organization
- Meeting the requirement of IT service availability
- Valuable documentation of IT service management
- Continued high levels of service quality
- Improved end-user satisfaction
End users may report incidents in a number of ways such as through a self-service portal where they fill in applicable input fields regarding the nature of the incident. A successful incident management system records incidents and classifies them based on their urgency and impact. It then assigns the incident to the right staff member.
Incident Management Metrics
There are 3 metrics for deciding the order in which incidents should be processed: Impact: How does the incident affect the business? Urgency: How long can the resolution of the incident be delayed by? Priority: How quickly should the service desk address the problem? Priority may depend on the combination of impact and urgency. Top priority incidents are considered high impact and high urgency while low impact and low urgency equate to low priority. Incident management has five steps:
- Initial diagnosis occurs when someone from the service desk assesses the information on the incident and may speak directly with the person who reported it to diagnose the problem accurately.
- Escalation means the Helpdesk or Service Desk assigns an Incident to a more expert team when the nature of the incident dictates so.
- Investigation is the step when the service desk uses the diagnosis and related information to determine the resolution to the problem.
- Resolution and recovery is the stage where the incident is resolved, documented by the service desk. Escalations are cancelled if any.
- Closure is the final step in the incident management process. Typically, there is a checklist of activities that need to be performed is verify the initial categorization that was assigned to the incident and may involve a survey for the end user regarding their level of satisfaction in the way the incident was handled
TeamHeadquarters aims to help you mature your IT organization with their integrated system that allows for the formalization of IT through ITSM. Their Key ITSM Components include:
- Availability Management
- Capacity Management
- Asset Management
- Service Desk
- IT Operations
- Incident Management
- Problem Management
- Root Cause Management
