Why is incident management important

Incident Management

Incident Management – Minimize the negative impact of sudden service interruptions or product quality degradations by restoring normal product operation as soon as possible.

Why is incident management important?

Incident management helps:

Influence the perception of the product, its quality and form expectations.
Rational use of resources when solving, ranking incidents according to the degree of impact on the product:
Low-impact incidents need to be managed rationally so that they do not consume too many resources.
Incidents with a larger impact on the product require more resources and more complex management.
Separate processes are often used for major incident management as well as information security incident management.Inform concerned teams and specialists about the status of difficulties in the operation of the product.
Ensure that teams communicate effectively when working on incidents using communication tools.
Prevent the recurrence of incidents, thanks to the information accumulated in the course of solving previous incidents.

Ensure timely selection of incident resolution methods:

Sequential recovery procedures according to a ready-made technique.
Engaging a team with knowledge and experience in a specific subject area.
According to the method of collective analysis called “Swarm”, when at the initial stage it means the joint work of several teams of different competencies until it becomes clear who is best to continue working on the solution.
What happens if you don’t manage incidents?

Negative perception of the product:

Recurring problems in the operation of the product.
Long recovery times after failures.
The absence of a prepared temporary solution-crutch to minimize the negative impact on the product during the search for the final solution.
Irrational use of resources when solving:
Repeated repetition of the process of finding a solution that was previously found when solving previous incidents due to the lack of accumulated structured information on previously resolved incidents.
Using insufficient resources to try to resolve major incidents.
Deploying massive and expensive resources to deal with minor incidents.

The impossibility of resolving some incidents at all:

There is no individual solution method for a specific product.
There is no binding information about the competencies of teams suitable for solving a complex incident.
To whom can incident management be delegated?
Incident management involves the involvement of a wide range of participants in the process, including teams of specialists, users, management, lawyers, suppliers and third parties, if their services are involved in part of the product.

Examples of behavior

Untimely and insufficiently complete entry of information about the progress of the incident resolution or failure to enter such information at all will lead to an irrational resolution of similar incidents in the future or even to the impossibility of solving
No ranking of incidents by severity and impact on the product
Selecting an ineffective method for resolving a complex incident if none of the previously described procedures fit, without involving a team with the appropriate competence, vendor support, or collective analysis, if necessary.
Focus on finding the culprit.

Examples of good behavior

Use the appropriate incident management toolkit, with blocks and links in incident records describing the impact on product configuration components, related issues, known errors, and other information, to enable fast and efficient diagnosis and recovery.
Involve supplier support specialists to work on incidents, if necessary. Prepare relevant contract clauses in advance.
Initiate the creation, use, constant and high-quality filling of the help system in order to be able to resolve incidents by the users themselves at the time of occurrence.
Formalize the incident logging and management process to improve the efficiency of incident investigation and diagnosis.

Practice

The implementation of incident management should begin with the mandatory recording of each incident and entering detailed information describing the progress of the solution, so it will be possible to accumulate a knowledge base and link parts of information and quickly find what you need in previously resolved incidents, thereby increasing the speed of the solution and reducing the negative impact on the product. With the growth of the product, it is necessary to formalize the procedures for working with incidents for the same perception of information and the actions taken by all involved teams – this way it is possible to unite completely different teams with different competencies for coordinated work on incidents.