Unplanned interruptions or reductions in the quality of IT services all underline what makes an Incident.
When incidents arise effective Incident Management is key in ensuring swift restoration of service, clear communication to all stakeholders, adopting lessons learnt and a number of additional components that all form the handling of and Incident.
As part of our Managed Service offering, we align with ITIL v4 Incident Management processes and procedures and adapt where necessary to accommodate your specific business needs. Summary of these key principles are below:
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Define the incident management process by establishing a clear framework that outlines the roles, responsibilities, and procedures for handling incidents.
This includes Management, Service Management, Service Desk, Major Incident Management and the technical teams which are all involved in the end-to-end lifecycle of an Incident.
Ensuring all parties know their roles and responsibilities avoids any uncertainty or confusion.
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Establish a system for identifying and prioritizing incidents based on their impact and urgency.
We have an internal Matrix we use as part of Managed Services which enables us to effectively classify impact and urgency on a per customer basis to ensure we are supporting each incident as efficiently as possible to that customer's needs.
Ensuring relevant resources and processes are applied correctly are critical to the handling of incidents.
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Create a system for creating and maintaining incident records. Incident records should contain details such as detailed description, date and time of the incident, the affected systems, the impacted users etc..
The information gathering stage at the start of an Incidents lifecycle is vital in ensuring no gaps or missing information that could lead to uncertainty as the lifecycle of an incident progresses.
As part of our Managed Services we employ Jira Service Management as our ITSM tool to record, track and resolve all incidents for our customers.
Incidents can be logged via our dedicated bespoke Customer Portals, Help Desk or via our automated monitoring tools
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As well as the technical expertise and knowledge to fix the incident it is vital to ensure proper processes are in place to record lessons learnt.
Whether that be in a Known Error Database or internal Knowledge Sharing, capturing these lessons are invaluable as part of supporting customers on Managed Services
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Different levels of communication should be adopted dependent on the severity and impact of the incident.
Whether it’s a low impact issue with narrow communication channels or you are adopting Major Incident Management processes for regular and high-level communication the principles are the same in ensuring those who need to know are informed at the correct stage
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There are a number of tools both on the technical monitoring solution side as well as the ITSM side that provide avenues for analytics, reporting and the ability to identify service improvements.
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In this blog we have covered the key elements of a successful Incident Management process.
The steps outlined above are the key cornerstones as part of our Managed Services ITSM that helps support our customers and their environments.