Any IT issue that results in the disruption of business services is known as an incident. The issue may affect a single or multiple users. It may affect your employees’ ability to complete a business deliverable or hinder customers from using your product or service.
Every organization should have an incident management team that can identify, categorize, escalate and resolve issues within agreed-upon SLAs. Depending on the available resources, you can handle incident management in-house or explore IT service desk outsourcing.
It is always a good idea to set business processes beforehand. ITIL is a framework aiming to standardize IT services’ lifecycle within businesses. You can refer to their incident management templates which are based on ITSM best practices, and adapt them to your unique business requirement.
The article will look at the overall steps involved in incident management and how you can learn from incidents and improve your IT infrastructure.
What are the Steps in the Incident Management Process?
These steps may differ from one organization to another, but overall incident management may include the five stages mentioned below.
- Incident Logging
- Incident Categorization and Assignment
- Incident Diagnosis
- Incident Resolution
- Incident Closure
1. Incident Logging
These steps may differ from one organization to another, but overall incident management may include the five stages mentioned below.
- Incident Logging
- Incident Categorization and Assignment
- Incident Diagnosis
- Incident Resolution
- Incident Closure
2. Incident Categorization and Assignment
These steps may differ from one organization to another, but overall incident management may include the five stages mentioned below.
- Incident Logging
- Incident Categorization and Assignment
- Incident Diagnosis
- Incident Resolution
- Incident Closure
3. Incident Diagnosis
These steps may differ from one organization to another, but overall incident management may include the five stages mentioned below.
- Incident Logging
- Incident Categorization and Assignment
- Incident Diagnosis
- Incident Resolution
- Incident Closure
4. Incident Resolution
These steps may differ from one organization to another, but overall incident management may include the five stages mentioned below.
- Incident Logging
- Incident Categorization and Assignment
- Incident Diagnosis
- Incident Resolution
- Incident Closure
5. Incident Closure
These steps may differ from one organization to another, but overall incident management may include the five stages mentioned below.
- Incident Logging
- Incident Categorization and Assignment
- Incident Diagnosis
- Incident Resolution
- Incident Closure
Why is it Necessary to Have an Incident Management Team?
Business disruptions can be expensive. For example, in March 2019, Facebook faced a downtime of 14 hours which cost them about $90 million in lost revenue. Of course, the monetary loss may vary, but for small to medium-sized companies, the impact could be much more widespread.
The incident management team will lead the resolution process from start to end. They will involve the responsible teams and follow up on the diagnosis. In the meantime, they will update the status board and other channels like social media to let users know the company is aware of the issue and working on it.
Regular updates are essential as they provide customers transparency and keep them in the loop. Without communication, even if the company resolves the issue, it could still lead to dissatisfied customers as they do not know what is happening.
The team can also document incidents that business users can use for reporting purposes.
Summary
According to the ITIL framework, the incident management process can overall include the stages of incident logging, categorization, assignment, diagnosis, resolution, and closure.
Depending on the cause, the service desk, L2, and L3 support teams, vendors, and business users could be involved in the resolution process.
It is essential to have an incident management team as the agents can drive the calls, update stakeholders and ensure the issue is fixed according to SLAs.