ITIL: Incident Management March 9, 2006
So, the Service Desk has been setup. Now it’s time to give them some work to do 
First and primary aspect, is Incident Management (and it’s important to distinguish Incident Management from Problem Management - that comes next).
Essential Activities of the Incident Management Process & Function:
- Detection and Recording
- Classification and initial support
- Prioritization (impact and urgency)
- Investigation and diagnosis
- Resolution and recovery
- Closure
- Ownership, monitoring, tracking and communication
- Providing Management Information
- Managing the Incident Life Cycle
Incident Management provides the following Benefits to the Organization:
- Improved monitoring
- Improved management in information on aspects of service quality
- Better staff utilization, leading to greater efficiency
- Elimination of lost or incorrect Incidents and service requests
- More accurate CMDB information
- Improved User and Customer satisfaction
and has the following (potential) challenges:
- No one to manage and escalate Incidents
- Specialist support staff being subject to constant interruptions, making them less effective
- Business staff being disrupted as people ask their colleagues for advice
- Lack of coordinated management information
- Lost, or incorrectly managed Incidents
Some Key Performance Indicators that could be used to monitor and manage the Incident Management function are:
- Quickly Resolve Incidents
- % reduction in incidents incorrectly assigned or categorized
- % increase in incidents resolved at first line support
- Maintain IT Service Quality
- % increase of incidents resolved within target times
- Reduction in incident backlog
- Improve Business and IT Productivity
- % reduction in average cost of incident handling
- % reduction where first line is bypassed
- User Satisfaction
- Surveys
Incident Management is one of those areas where “the rubber meets the road” - if you don’t have these processes nailed down, failures, both actual and perceived, can spiral outwards. Personnel assigned to Incident Management, within the Service Desk function, are very much the face of your support organization.
(the above is part of an ongoing series of notes I’m making as I review the ITIL processes I currently work to in my “day job”. Other notes can be found by browsing the ITIL category here).
And we’re back…
A little busy in the day job, followed by a few days sickness, led to the recent dearth of substantive posts here. “Normal service is resuming”. Coming up, maybe some iPod stuff, definately some more ITIL notes, and who knows what else. Thanks for reading.