Incident Management

An Incident is an event which is not part of standard operation and which which causes or may cause an interruption or reduction of the quality of service.

Purpose and Objective:Incident Management is to restore the normal service operation as soon as possible to minimize the impact on the business operation, at cost effective price.

Impact:
The impact of Incident is determined by the affect it  has on the business of the organization known as buisness impact.
Impact Measurement:

• How many user got affected
• How many and which service is affected
• What category of buisness users affected (VIP,frontline staff etc.)

Urgency
of an Incident is the speed with which an incident needs to be resolved and its depends on the impact of the incident if the impact is high it need to be resolved urgently.

Categorization 

• Hardware: server , Memory board,card failure
• Software: Application,Finance suite,System failure

Priority

A incident with lower impact and average urgency and be resolved with minor effort and will be resolved immediately in most organization.

A incident with high Impact to the business/users will come under Major Incident category for these incidents even timescale of disruption to a even relatively small percentage of users become excessive should always be regarded as major.

Initial Diagnosis 

Done by service desk analyst while the incident reporter (user) is still on phone and try to discover the full symptoms it is at this stage the diagnostic script and the known error database comes handy

Functional Escalation

if the service desk is not able to resolve the incident it should immediately be escalated for further support and further Hierarchical escalations.

Note: The ownership of incident still remains with service desk regardless of whether an incident has been refer so its service desk responsibility of tracking the incident,keeping user informed and ultimately    closing the incident.

KPI for IM

• Total number of incidents
• Percentage of Incident handled within the stipulated response time in the SLA
• Average cost per Incident 
• Incident processed per service desk
• Number of incident resolved remotely 
• Number of incident resolved by service desk with escalation

Incident Manager:
 -- InGeneral Role 
* Ensure Technical team is following incident management process during incident resolution
* Produce management report and KPI reports
* Audit the incident management process
* Scope for resolution
-- Role during Major incident
* All incident first come to IM for assessing the priority of the incident based on the urgency
   and impcat
* Bring all required team under oneIncident bridge call
* Publish senior management and customer real time communication
* Support Problem management team for getting the rootcause but he will not identify
   problem management team will do that

Input for Incident: It can come from user , Management information or Detection systems.

Output of Process: RFC, resolved and closed incidents,management information,communication to the customer.





 Activities of Incident Management Process

• Detection of incident and recording
• Classification and initial support
• investigation and diagnosis
• resolution and recovery
• Closure of incident 
• Incident ownership,monitoring,tracking communication

Misssion Statement:

Restore normal state of IT service operation as quickly as possible to minimize the adverse affect on buissness and users and buisness operations.

Process Goal Achieve the process mission by implementing

• ITIL aligned policies,process and procedures
• Incident escalation standards
• Dedicated Incident Management Pro. Owner
• Incident classification categories
• Incident reports
• Incident communication and education for IT staffs

Incident Management VS Problem Management

Incidents and Service Requests are formally managed through a staged process to conclusion. This process is referred to as the "Incident Management Lifecycle". The objective of the Incident Management Lifecycle is to restore the service as quickly as possible to meet Service Level Agreements. The process is primarily aimed at the user level.

Problem Management deals with resolving the underlying cause of one or more Incidents. The focus of Problem Management is to resolve the root cause of errors and to find permanent solutions. Although every effort will be made to resolve the problem as quickly as possible this process is focused on the resolution of the problem rather than the speed of the resolution. This process deals at the enterprise level.