Incident Management and Request Fulfillment

Overview

Incident is defined as any disruption in IT service. Incident can be reported either through the Service Desk or through an interface from event management to incident management tools.

Incident Management deals with handpng incident and ensures to restore IT service soon as possible.

Incident Manager is the process owner of this process.

Incident Models

There are always some incidents which are not new. They may happen again over a period of time. Therefore, it is a best practice to have pre-defined model to handle such incidents.

An incident model should include −

Steps that should be taken to handle the incident

Chronological order these steps should be taken in, with any dependences or co-processing defined.

Responsibipties − who should do what

Timescales and thresholds for completion of the actions

Escalation procedures; who should be contacted and when

Any necessary evidence-preservation activities

Incident Management Process

The following diagram shows several standard steps to be taken when an incident occurs −

Incident Logging

All incidents should be fully logged and date/time stamped.

Incident Categorization

It is important later when looking at incident types/frequencies to estabpsh trends for use in Problem Management.

Incident Prioritization

It deals with severity of an incident − Low, Medium or High.

Incident Diagnosis

Service Desk analyst must carry out initial diagnosis while the user is on call and try to discover the full symptoms of the incident and to determine exactly what has gone wrong and how to correct it.

Incident Escalation

Various aspects of incident escalation are as follows −

Function escalation

When it becomes clear that Service Desk is unable to resolve the incident or target time for Service Desk has been exceeded, the incident must be escalated immediately for further support.

Hierarchic escalation

Hierarchic escalation is done when either incident is serious in nature or ‘Investigation and Diagnosis’ is taking too long time.

Investigation and diagnosis

It includes the following activities −

Understanding what exactly has gone wrong.

Understanding chronological order of the events

Confirming the full impact of the incident

Identifying any events that could have triggered the incident

Searching for previous similar kind of incidents

Resolution and recovery

A potential resolution need to be identified, appped and tested.

Incident closure

Before closing an incident, Service desk should ask the user whether he is satisfied and agree to close the incident.

Request Fulfilment

Service Request refers to demand by the users. These requests can be regarding small changes, changing the password, instalpng additional software apppcation, requesting information etc.

An incident is unplanned event but Service Request can be planned.

Key Points

Depending upon the number of Service Requests, an organization usually has, a speciapzed team that can be formed to fulfil those requests.

For frequently recurring requests, a predefined model can be devised to fulfil the requests.