What is Incident Management?

An incident is a disruption of a normal technology service that affects the user and the business. The goal of Incident Management is to restore IT services to the normal state as quickly as possible with the solutions necessary to ensure that the incident will not affect business.

The incident is an event that is not part of the normal pattern of operation, is an event you do not want to happen but it happens eventually. In a nutshell, the Incident Management is a process of managing disruptions in critical IT services and restore them as quickly as possible.

I imagine this explanation makes you believe that the incident management process will be a super laborious and complicated, however, the Incident Management tells you how to implement a Help Desk that understands and works to meet business priorities.

The Incident Management shows the need of a process for restoring service. The function of a Service Desk is the glue that binds the support service modules with a Single Point of Contact with the user and ensures that IT services remain focused on the business.

Check now the basic information that an Incident Management should include:

  • Record basic details of the user.
  • The user is reporting an outage or requesting further services.
  • If the client is asking for new services, open a new Service Request:
    • Train your Helpdesk Analysts to return to the user who asked for a new service.
    • Train the Helpdesk to record the details of the request with urgency and priority.
    • Train the helpdesk staff to look for the terms of settlement.
    • Train staff to look for answers in the FAQs.
  • If the customer is reporting a service disruption:
    • Determine whether or not it is an incident with a basic diagnosis of the situation.
    • Check if you can help with a solution of the knowledge base.
    • Assign the incident to a Specialist Support Group.
    • Work closely with the Specialist Support Group to provide resolution to the user.
    • Close the incident with user confirmation.

Do you agree?

How do you manage your incident management?