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 handling 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 best practice to have pre-defined model to handle such incidents.

An incident models 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
• Responsibilities − 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

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 establish 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

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, applied 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, installing additional software application, requesting information etc.

Incident is unplanned event but Service Request can be planned.

Key Points −

• Depending upon number of Service Requests, an organization usually has, a specialized teams can be formed to fulfil those requests.
• For frequently recurring requests, a predefined model can be devised to fulfil the requests.