Incident Management

Process

  • To what extent was the specified incident management process adhered to?
  • Have there been deviations from the incident management workflow?
  • Were the SLAs respected for the incident? If not, which SLA requirements were violated? Why?
  • Was the incident resolution process properly monitored?
  • Can the process be improved to make it more efficient? If yes, how?

Reports

  • Were reports created to analyze how the incident was resolved?
  • What parameters were included in such reports?
  • What aspects of the incident life cycle have been analyzed?
  • Are there opportunities for improvement? If yes, how can this be achieved?

External Evaluation – End User Surveys

In addition to the above factors, a number of factors faced by end users should also be assessed. To do this, after the incident is closed, a survey is conducted to collect feedback from end users affected by the incident.

  • The results of this survey will provide answers to the following questions:
  • How easy or difficult was it for the end user to report the problem?
  • Was the first response from the IT department quick and prompt?
  • Was the incident resolved in a timely manner?
  • How satisfied is the end user with the solution?

IT incident management is one of the main processes in the work of a help desk. This guide provides an overview of incident management, its components, roles and responsibilities, and how management aligns with other components of the help desk job.

The topics covered in this guide are listed below.

  • ITIL Incident Management Life Cycle/Scheme
  • Roles and responsibilities in incident management
  • Incident Management Key Performance Indicators
  • Benefits of Incident Management
  • Incident Management Best Practices
  • List of Incident Management Software Features
  • Differences between Incident Management and Problem Management
  • Differences between incident management and change management
  • Differences between Incident Management and Asset Management
  • Glossary of ITIL Incident Management Terms

Incident Management

An IT incident is a disruption to an organization’s IT services that affects both the individual user and the organization as a whole. In short, an incident is any situation that interrupts the smooth running of a business.

What is IT Incident Management?

Incident management is the process of managing disruptions to IT services and restoring them to service within the time frame specified in the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The scope of incident management begins when an issue is reported by the end user and ends when the issue is resolved by the help desk engineer.

Incident Management Steps

By properly managing incidents, you can optimize the collection of information about incidents and organize it, getting rid of the confusion in e-mail correspondence. Help Desk professionals can publish the appropriate forms on the User Self-Service Portal to ensure that all the necessary information is collected in a timely manner when creating a ticket.

The next step in incident management involves classifying an incident and assigning it a priority.

This not only helps to sort incoming applications, but also ensures that the application is forwarded to those specialists who have all the necessary knowledge and skills to resolve the problem. By classifying incidents, the most appropriate SLAs are applied to incidents, and end users can learn about the priority of their calls. Once an incident has been assigned a class and priority, technicians can run diagnostics and provide the end user with an appropriate solution.

When appropriate automation processes are in place, incident management allows service desk professionals to track SLA compliance. You can also configure the notification of technical specialists about the violation of the SLA; technicians can also escalate SLA violations by setting up automatic escalation when applicable to an incident. After diagnosing the problem, the technician offers the end user a solution that the end user can test. This multi-step process ensures that IT issues that affect business continuity are quickly resolved.