7 Best Practices to Improve Incident Management Process (2024)

Here are some of the best practices that every business house in the IT sector should follow to transform their work environment in improving the Incident Management at their organization.

• Clearly Define Incident

  It is the urgent issues that can really cause a devastating business impact on several users, as a result, it is of absolute necessity to categorize the issue as a significant incident as a whole. However, it influences an organization to deviate from existing incident management processes. In most of the cases high priority events or emergency issues are wrongly seen as significant incidents, and this is most likely because of the absence of clear ITIL rules. Thus, to stay away from any types of confusion, one should clearly define a significant incident based on elements like urgency, impact, and severity.

  See Also

  Seven steps to implementing a successful incident response plan - Applied RiskMajor Incident Policy and Process Flow : TechWeb : Boston University6 Steps to Incident Management8 Items to Include in Incident Reports

• Create A Robust Workflows

  Implementation of a dynamic work process does encourage an individual to re-establish a disrupted service on an urgent basis, as a result, separate work processes for major incidents do help to deal with inconsistent goals at one go. Whereas, one should mostly concentrate on automating and simplifying the following when you plan a work process for a particular incident. Some of the techniques are as follows:

  • Always Identify the major incident
  • Communicate it to the impacted stakeholders
  • Always assign the correct individuals
  • Track the major incident throughout its lifecycle
  • Escalate it upon breach of SLAs
  • Resolve the incident and close it on an immediate basis
  • Generation and analyses of reports regarding the following incidents
  • Always try to have a quick approval process in place for resolving the major incidents

• Execute the Right Resources

  Always make sure that the best resources of your organizations are implemented appropriately to work on major incidents, also, define their roles and responsibilities, and it will impact on the incidents that businesses already suffer from. One could always have a committed or a temporary emergency backup team depending upon how regularly significant incidents arises. Thus, the essential target should be to keep your resources always engaged and maintain safe distance from conflict at the time of urgent needs.

• Provide Training to Employees and Equip them with the Right Tools

  It is obvious that major incident can occur at your company, yet the initial step is to take care of it is by being prepared. Always, divide your major incident management team into several other sub categorized teams and provide them with maximum training. Also, assign responsibilities by mapping skills with requirements. However, enterprise teams are trained with the updated ITSM certification courses including those of ITIL 4 Foundation, VeriSM, SIAM, etc. Thus, one should implement widely-recognized ITSM frameworks and deliver quality IT services that aligns as per organizational business techniques. However, organizing simulation tests frequently aids you to easily identify your strengths, evaluate performance and address gaps as and when needed. Likewise, the experts assist your group to cope up with pressure and be prepared when they confront with a similar situation. One should provide the appropriate equipment’s to your team, for example, PDAs, phablets, and tablets with a consistent network for them to work from anyplace amidst an emerging crisis.

• Keep Your Stakeholders Informed

  One should always make sure that the stakeholders are kept well informed about a particular incident management issue throughout its lifecycle. If possible, send announcements, notifications, and status updates, and try to report it in the self-service portal, as it will immediately prevent end users from raising duplicate tickets and overloading the help desk as a whole. Thus, one should also keep a continuous track of immediate response to that of urgent incidents, and offer immediate help to its partners. One should utilize the quickest methods of communication to resolve the urgent issues, either through phone calls, direct walk-ins, live talk, and remote-control work area, rather than depending on emails.

• Tie Major Incidents with Other ITIL Processes

  Once you resolve the major incidents, always perform deeper analysis by utilizing the problem management strategies as a whole. Then, one should implement organization-wide changes to prevent the occurrence of similar kinds of incidents in the future, just by ensuing the overall change management procedure. One also need to accelerate the whole incidents, urgent issues and change management procedure by providing in-depth analysis about the advantages included within the utilizing asset management procedure.

• Report on Significant Incidents

  Always, document and analyze all major incidents with the goal that you can distinguish the areas to improve, and this will help your group productively handle comparable issues. Whereas, they produce incident-specific reports for analysis, evaluation, and decision-making, and one can create the following reports to help in the proficient decision making:

  • It deals with number of major incidents raised and closed each month
  • Average resolution time for major incidents
  • Percentage of downtime caused due to major incidents
  • Problems and changes linked to major incidents

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