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Incident management is one of the pillars of an organization. It specializes in processing helpdesk issues raised by users and customers. In this blog, we are covering topics such as:
What is an Incident?
An incident is an unexpected disruption that disturbs the daily operations and functionality of the organization, resulting in a loss of productivity. When an asset does not function properly, that is called a disruption. Network failure, laptop issues, and Wi-Fi problems are a few examples of an incident.
What is an Example of an Incident?
Suppose you are in your office and your boss just told you to make a presentation on a topic so that he can discuss it with the clients in a meeting. But suddenly, your laptop is not working; it is hanged! That is an example of an incident!
What is Incident Management?
The process of managing the disruption of services, functions, or operations in an organization is known as Incident Management. It could lead to a loss of productivity and financial loss.
Incident Management is also known by other names, such as ticketing management, call management, or request management.
What is the Aim of Incident Management?
The main purpose of incident management is to re-establish services back to normal operation as quickly as possible, ensuring systematic methods are used for efficient response, analyzing reports, and finding improvement areas to enhance customer experience. The main aim of cloud-based Incident management is to ensure daily operations run smoothly and if there is any problem, then solve it in minimum time.
What are the Advantages of Incident Management?
There are several advantages of the incident management system given below:
1. Service Quality Maintained
When a ticket is generated, it defines the priority of the issue: low, medium, or high. It means that critical issues can be resolved on top priority, improving the response time because the IT staff communicates with the clients via the ticketing system.
2. Scope of Improvement
With the help of Incident Management Software, you can get various details, such as how much time a ticket is taking to be resolved? How much time is spent on a ticket? So, it can acquire data from every incident entered in the system and make reports with assistance. This will help you find where there is scope for improvement in order to close the ticket at the earliest.
3. IT Service Management Documentation
Shareholders and potential business partners need data and documentation that prove how much incident management software provides assistance in order to reduce the restoring time and make the customer happy. These types of documentation are prepared with the complaint ticketing system.
4. User Satisfaction
When the technical support and IT Staff solve the problem of the clients quickly and effectively, they will be satisfied with the quick prompt solution and they will provide a good review.
5. Increased Productivity
If your company has few or abundant assets, incident management software can enhance efficiency and increase profitability. Incident management software utilizes a procedure for each incident, executed by each staff member. It does not leave any room for assumptions about the issue. The right steps are taken to rectify the issue.
What are the Various Stages Involved with Incident Management?
The various stages involved with incident management are as follows:
1. Discover Incident
The first step in the workflow follow-up is the identification of the incident. By generating the incident by the user online, a ticket is generated.
Now the service desk will decide whether the issue is an incident or just a request. If it is a request, then it will be categorized and handled differently, and if it is an incident, they will follow a request fulfillment procedure so that a ticket can be generated.
This incident ticket will carry information like the name of the user, his/her contact details, incident description, and date and time of the incident report.
2. Diagnosis
The diagnosis of the incident ticket will include the categorization and prioritization of the ticket raised.
The categorization step is for assigning a category to the incident with at least one subcategory for its definite identification. This step serves many purposes, from allowing the service desk to sort the incident to allowing the issue for their automatic prioritization.
The incident's prioritization can be determined from its impact on the users, on the business, and its urgency. Based on its urgency, the incident is quickly resolved.
Low-priority incidents are those incidents that do not interrupt the users, the business, and its workaround. So, the services provided to the users and customers can be maintained efficiently.
Medium-priority incidents affect a few staff, and work is also interrupted to some extent. So, the users and customers may be slightly affected.
High-priority incidents affect a large number of users or customers as they interrupt business and affect service delivery. These incidents almost always put a financial impact on the organization.
3. Logging
The incident now needs to be logged so that it can be observed and followed up anytime for the incident resolving process.
Incident logging refers to the fact that incidents reported to the service desk are logged with the date and time stamp that they are generated.
Incident logging details will include:
A unique identification number
Incident category
Date and time recorded
Incident impact and urgency
User details
Description of symptoms
Resolution details
Closure date and time
4. Response
The response is the action taken to solve the incident, solving the problem with all the correct information in the data feed.
Once identified, categorized, prioritized, and logged, the service desk can handle and resolve the incident.
Incident resolution involves a few steps:
Initial diagnosis: An initial diagnosis occurs when the user describes his or her problem and answers all the troubleshooting questions correctly.
Incident escalation: This happens when an incident requires advanced support, such as sending an on-site technician or assistance from certified support staff.
Investigation and diagnosis: Investigation of the process takes place during troubleshooting when the initial incident theory is confirmed to be correct.
When the incident is diagnosed, the service desk staff will implement a solution to it, which may include changes in software settings or applying a software patch or ordering new hardware.
5. Restoration to Normality
After the service desk has figured out what exactly was the issue, they will create an efficient and effective resolution to solve the incident query.
6. Closure
Whenever the incident's problems are solved, the process of incident management finally comes to closure. At this point, the incident is considered to be closed and the incident process will end.
What is the Various Status of an Incident?
New - This is the initial stage in which the helpdesk ticketing system has received the incident (issue or ticket) however it has not been assigned to any technical support agent. Therefore, it has not been processed yet.
Assigned - This is the second stage of the incident-solving process, where the ticket is assigned to the technician.
In progress - In this stage, the technical support agent diagnoses the issue and starts working on the issue. The best solutions are explored in this process.
On hold/Pending - When the ticket is put on hold, it means that the technical support agent is waiting for some response, information, or source such as a hard disk, ram, a processor from the third party. Therefore, this waiting stage is called hold or pending from the third party.
Resolved - When the response, information, or source is received, then the same is told to the customer and service is restored.
Closed - This is the last stage of the incident status after once acknowledged with the user, the issue, ticket, or incident is closed.
What is the Scope of Incident Management?
According to Simplilearn, “Incident management includes any event which disrupts or something which is capable of causing a disruption to the service. This includes events that are communicated directly by users – through an interface from event management to incident management tools – or through the service desk.”
Conclusion
Incident management shows the status & category of the issue, raised ticket, and time taken to solve the incident. Incident management helps in gathering data for evaluation. Moreover, the data helps organizations make better decisions and improve service quality.
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