Incident management is a method employed by development or IT Operations teams to respond to unplanned events or service interruptions and return the service to its operational condition.
In Diligent Global, we define an incident as a situation that causes disruption or a decrease in the standard of service, requiring an immediate response. Teams that follow ITIL or ITSM guidelines may employ the term “major incident” instead. Incidents are any event that interrupts or affects services’ quality (or is likely to do so). An application that is down for business is an instance. A crawling-but-not-yet-dead web server can be an incident, too. It’s not running at a high speed and is disrupting productivity. Even more troubling, it carries an even greater chance of failure. The severity of incidents can differ widely. It can range from an application/server going down to a tiny number of users experiencing intermittent problems.
A problem is resolved when the affected service can function in its original state. This only includes the tasks required to minimize the impact and restore functionality.
Importance of Managing Incidents
Incident management is among the most crucial processes that an organization must be able to do right. Service interruptions are costly for businesses, and teams require an effective method to respond to these issues and fix them promptly. Teams need a reliable method to prioritize issues, resolve them sooner, and provide better customer service to users.
Improve their processes to ensure the service will continue to be successful in the future.
- Respond quickly so they will recover soon.
- Be transparent with customers as well as stakeholders, service managers, and other members of the company.
- Effectively collaborate to help solve the problem quicker by working together and removing barriers that stop the team from solving the problem.
- Continuously improve and discover the causes of these issues and apply the lessons to improve the quality of service. Improve their processes to ensure the service will continue to be successful in the future.
What happens if IT Incident Management is not in place?
- Incomplete transparency regarding the status of tickets and dates for the end-users.
- No proper record of previous incidents.
- Inability to provide solutions for repeated or similar problems.
- Greater risk of business interruptions, especially in the event of major disruptions.
- Time-stretched resolutions
- Insufficient reporting capabilities.
- Low Customer satisfaction
Types of Incident Management Processes
Different types of businesses tend to favor different incident-management methods. No, one method works best for every company, and you will likely see different strategies across various companies.
Many teams use old-fashioned IT-style incident management procedures, such as those described within ITIL certifications. Some teams prefer more of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or DevOps-style incident handling procedure.
IT Incident Management Process
A process for managing incidents aids IT teams in investigating, tracking, and addressing outages or service interruptions. This decreases downtime and minimizes the impact on employees’ productivity due to incidents. Using processes designed explicitly for managing incident management, develop an ongoing incident management workflow to ensure that teams report to identify, resolve, and report incidents. They also keep track of their actions.
ITIL is an ITIL framework primarily utilized by IT teams managing enterprise services. Most teams get the information they require from ITIL, which encompasses almost every kind of incident, issue, and procedure IT teams could face and take the rest to. ITIL is an excellent tool for teams that need to concentrate on creating a culture that encourages active troubleshooting. The established processes allow teams to monitor incidents and their activities consistently, improving the reporting and analysis process and resulting in better service and a more efficient team.
Steps of the IT Incident Management Procedure
- Find an incident and record it
An Incident could originate from any of the following sources: an employee, an individual customer, an organization, or a vendor. Whatever the cause, the first two steps are the same when someone notices and records an incident. The logs of incidents (i.e., tickets) generally contain:
- A name for the individual who reported the incident
- The time and date the incident was published
- The description for the event (what is not functioning correctly)
- A unique identification number assigned to the incident to allow for tracking
- Categorization of the tickets
Create a logical, clear category (and subcategories, if needed) for each incident. This will help you examine your data to identify patterns and trends that are crucial aspects of effective problem management and preventing further incidents from happening.
- Prioritize
Every incident has to be considered prioritized. Begin by assessing the impact on the company and the number of employees affected, as well as any relevant SLAs and possible security, financial, and compliance implications from the event. Examine the incident in relation to other open events to establish its importance. It is advisable to determine your level of severity and priority before an incident happens, making it easier for incident supervisors to determine priority quickly.
- Respond
- Initial diagnosis: In the ideal situation, your primary support team should be able to follow the incident from the moment of diagnosis to close. However, if they don’t begin, your next task is to document all pertinent details and then escalate the issue to the next team.
- Escalate: The second team will take the data logged and continue the diagnostic procedure. If the next team isn’t able to identify the problem, it will be escalated to the next team.
- Communicate: The team should regularly share updates with the affected internal and external users.
- Diagnostics and Investigation: The process continues until the root cause of the issue is established. Teams sometimes invite external experts or other departmental members to discuss and help resolve the resolution.
- Resolution, Recovery, and Dissolution In this phase, the team comes to an assessment and takes the necessary steps to end the problem. Recovery refers to the time required for the operation to be fully restored. Some solutions (like bug patches, etc.) might require testing and deployment after determining the correct resolution.
- Closure: If the incident is escalated, it is then passed on to the customer service department to be closed. To ensure the highest quality and an efficient procedure, only employees of the service desk are allowed to close the incident. The incident owner must check with the person who made the report to ensure that the resolution was satisfactory and that the incident can, in fact, be closed.
Key success factors for selecting Managed IT Development Services
Companies would benefit from the following factors when looking for an ideal IT partner:
Reusable knowledge library
Reusable libraries reduce effort and time to deliver customized software solutions. Having solved similar industry-specific problems over time, we were able to devise reusable components that could be implemented with minimum changes. It is also a sign of maturity and competence of our skilled teams.
Quality and cost
A state of the art distributed delivery model based on proven methodologies enables us to create high-quality custom solutions with a focus on reducing costs and improving quality.
Transition to steady state
Companies are looking for a seamless transition from implementation to support through relevant documentation, knowledge transfer protocols and support hubs to collect, analyze and resolve issues in real time. We have built a solid team with vast experience in managing Diligent Sofware Services projects.
Diligent Global provides transformational benefits to business stakeholders
Our one-team approach makes it attractive for companies to invest their trust in us and we align with our customer’s business need for more speed at less cost.
Trusted partnership:
By building extended teams that provide global + local (Glocal) support, we evolved as high-quality trusted partners to our clients worldwide.
Access to skilled talent:
Diligent Cloud Services provides visibility & access to skilled talent required to manage, execute and support custom development.
Full life cycle services:
Diligent Global supports tailored maintenance offerings for custom solutions.
Ready-to-access skills and expertise for managed IT development services
Some of the critical skills that Diligent Global can support you with are:
- Design & Development of custom applications for SAP Solutions on ABAP Platform
- Mobility and analytics applications
- HANA based standalone applications
- Integration with non-SAP solutions
- Quality review of Development
- Security Code Review
Quality and Project Management Standards
Diligent Global addresses your unique business requirements, provides you high quality custom solutions, leverages the latest technologies and minimizes your development risks using our unique methodology and Plan->Build->Run approach. We use best practices in Project Management, Quality Management, Change & Configuration Management, and Risk Management.
Quality initiatives include various types of testing activities such as: Unit, Functional, Integration, Regression, and Acceptance tests. Defect prevention processes include: causal analysis, final project review, phase end reviews, client feedback, and metrics analysis.
Delivery Methodologies and Continued Support
We follow proven development methodologies and standards to ensure high quality solutions. We mitigate business and technical risk by synchronizing custom solutions with the solution strategy and align with business vision. We ensure service flexibility and reduced delivery costs along with complete visibility of the solution through requirement traceability. We ensure that custom developed solutions continue to work optimally over time and reiterate our commitment to provide a flexible support model that addresses your business needs in the longer term.
