What is Incident Management? The Complete Guide.
Learn how you can bring operational excellence to your IT operations through enhanced incident management.
Incident management is the process of responding to service interruptions caused by outages or performance issues. (Think: a Wi-Fi connection that has gone down or an Android device that has gone on the blink). Every incident manager’s goal is to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible, so they can minimize the impacts on the business. Incident management also allows you to give your users a great digital employee experience.
At the ground level, incident management involves logging, classifying, prioritizing, investigating and diagnosing, and ultimately resolving service tickets. These processes are closely coordinated with the service desk, which is usually the chief point of contact. A good incident management portal includes robust self-service capabilities that employees can use to report issues, along with intelligent automation that instantly assigns those tickets to the right IT professionals and escalates them when needed.
Incident management can be considered an aspect of IT service management (ITSM), and it’s an important part of a company’s ITSM framework.
When a user needs to report an incident, they usually reach out to the IT service desk (also known as the L1 team). So, the people staffing the IT service desk are typically the folks you will most often find carrying out incident management processes at a company.
Within the IT service desk, you will find a number of people in roles—from generalist call center agents to super technical engineering staff—that can also be considered incident managers. An incident manager is responsible for responding to incidents, taking the necessary steps to restore service, and returning the business to normal operations as quickly as possible.
Incident management doesn’t necessarily have to be restricted to the service desk, though. It’s not uncommon to see people with incident management responsibilities located throughout the entire IT organization. On the flip side, some businesses choose to centralize their incident management functions within a dedicated IT service management (ITSM) unit.
What does incident management look like in action? Here are a few examples.
Upon returning to the office, an employee needs help with getting their password reset. This is a minor incident, typically classified as a level one issue. A member of the level 1 (L1) team is assigned this ticket and reaches out to the employee to help them reset their password.
A member of the finance department discovers a glitch in the accounting software while trying to run a budget analysis. This type of incident requires some knowledge about the business application and is usually considered a level two issue. An incident management solution should automatically assign this ticket to the level 2 (L2) team for near-term resolution.
Mayday! Mayday! The email server or cloud service is down, and no one can send or receive emails. This is—you guessed it—a major incident that requires a level three response. This one should go immediately to the level 3 (L3) pros, and the company’s incident response plan should be activated to ensure regular communication goes out to all stakeholders while the incident is being investigated and addressed.
Ok, so what’s the bottom line here? Why does incident management even matter in the first place?
To give you just a couple of reasons, incident management helps a company’s IT team provide great service and reduce costly downtime. But those are just for starters. Here are plenty more benefits associated with implementing incident management best practices.
When you have a formal incident management process in place, it’s much easier to identify issues in a timely manner. By using an IT service management solution that includes a configuration management database (CMDB), for example, you can quickly pinpoint the source of the incident and take action right away.
Consistency is key, especially when users are involved. When you’ve got a solid incident management process, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time an incident crops up. Everyone on your team will already know how to respond and who’s responsible for taking care of the problem. You’ll also have an automated process for keeping users proactively notified and up to date on the progress toward resolution, which they’ll appreciate.
With better incident management in place, your IT team can prioritize incidents according to their business impact. This means that instead of chasing down a relatively minor issue that can wait, you’ll be laser-focused on addressing that zero-day vulnerability that could leave your business open to a damaging ransomware attack.
Properly prioritizing incidents also allows you to avoid costly downtime, which frustrates users, IT, business leaders—pretty much everyone in the company, come to think of it. And when your IT team isn’t busy fighting fires, it can deliver a higher standard of service on a regular basis. In short, everybody wins.
Every IT team wishes it had more hours in the day to get its work done. With best practices for incident management in place, it can actually win back some time to take on higher-level initiatives of value to the company and ace the new digital transformation projects that just landed on its plate.
With more agility to innovate, IT can position itself as a strategic enabler, not just a cost center. This means, among other things, that IT will enjoy greater visibility and a higher profile within the company. Rather than simply calling the service desk when things go wrong, business leaders will be far more likely to approach IT for more meaningful collaboration.
IT is under pressure to deliver excellent customer service. This has always been true, seemingly from the beginning of time, but it’s especially true now that so many employees are working from home. Incident management allows your IT team to provide better service, earning positive feedback from those hard-to-please users who are counting on their tech to get their work done.
Key to a satisfying service experience, of course, is a timely response. Here, too, incident management can be a major asset. When your IT team isn’t wasting time attempting to figure out who’s responsible for handling an incident or deep in the weeds trying to hunt down the root cause of a low-priority issue, it will be able to respond to incidents much faster—and users will notice.
The folks on your IT team will be able to get their jobs done a lot faster and more efficiently if they have a standardized process for managing incidents. When that’s the case, they’ll be more satisfied in their jobs and deliver better service.
With a rock-solid incident management process in place, your service desk can become more accessible and user-friendly. As mentioned above, multi-channel support can help users bring up issues when they need to without running into roadblocks.
Keep your users in the loop by sending them alerts and notifications right from the first response to resolution as well as updates about the status of their tickets.
Take advantage of automation to keep regular notifications coming, bridging the communication gap between IT staff members and the users they support without requiring manual intervention from your IT employees.
If your IT team has clear goals and a good grip on their KPIs, they’ll know what success looks like and feel more motivated to strive for it. With engaged and happy IT employees, you can improve IT service delivery and improve user satisfaction.
When users are well-informed about the status of their open tickets and enjoy faster resolution of their issues, they will have a better digital employee experience (DEX). When that’s the case, you’ll find that employees throughout the company are more satisfied with IT—and you’ll see it in a steadily improving net promoter score (NPS).
So, how do incident management and ITIL relate to one another? Well, if you’re an ITIL shop or thinking of becoming one, you probably already know that incident management is an important part of any ITIL implementation—whether you’re following the ITIL v3 framework or its newer sibling, the ITIL v4 framework.
ITIL processes include incident management workflows that are designed to minimize downtime and mitigate an incident’s impact on the business. Although you can pick and choose the ITIL best practices that apply to your particular business needs, chances are that if you’re using ITIL, you’re going to be looking at formalizing your incident management processes soon—that is, if you haven’t already done so.
When you’re exploring best practices like incident management, change management, and problem management, you might feel the need to create a Venn diagram to keep them all straight. Not to worry. This brief explainer on the differences between incident vs. change vs. problem management will help you figure out which is which.
When you’re doing incident management, you’re reacting to an incident that has already happened, such as an interruption in internet service at the main office or a problem with an executive’s smartphone. Incident management allows you to solve the issue as effectively, efficiently, and quickly as possible so the business can return to normal operations and your users can get back to work.
Change management is more forward-looking, with a focus on reducing potential risks to the business in advance. For example, an IT team may use change management to successfully plan and execute an important technology upgrade, such as an update to the accounting software or a switch to a new business collaboration platform. Or it could involve a patch to a VPN server that resolves an underlying problem with VPN connectivity. Companies that follow best practices in change management may have a Change Advisory Board that verifies and approves these kinds of changes before they take place.
Sometimes, as you’re troubleshooting incidents, you’ll find that they’re a bit like Whac-A-Mole. No sooner have you resolved them than they pop up again. Problem management digs deeper to find the root cause of these incidents that are draining the company of IT resources and internal productivity, such as a malfunctioning server or an erratic VPN connection. This way, you can fix the underlying problem once and for all.
Every business needs an effective incident management process. It typically includes these five steps.
1. Incident logging
When an incident arises, it first needs to be logged. Incident logging not only provides a neat overview of all incidents that have occurred, but it also helps the IT team keep up with regulations and requirements. An incident log serves as documentation for the future. It includes all vital information about the incident, like the ID number, category, user information, date, and time.
What is the best way to make incident reporting easier for your users (especially non-IT employees)? The answer is multi-channel support. Once users have the ability to report incidents via various channels from email to phone calls to chatbots, it makes it much more convenient to raise a request or report a problem. By making it possible for users to report incidents using mobile devices, IT organizations can make it even easier, still.
2. Incident classification
Once an incident has been logged, the IT team identifies and verifies the categories that it can be classified into. This part of the incident management process is instrumental in improving the knowledge base and streamlining future support. This process involves form customization, which helps personalize forms with the right information and configures fields to suit various departments. Auto assignment of tickets goes a long way since it helps to assign tickets to the right people. Round-robin ticket assignments can enable more efficient workflow distribution.
3. Incident prioritization
To enable incident prioritization, an IT organization will create multiple SLA policies and define its escalation rules. SLA violations should be addressed by agents in an organized way. The priority matrix includes both the impact and urgency of incidents, helping IT teams quickly assign open incidents the proper priority levels for resolution.
4. Investigation and diagnosis
A major part of the incident management process is to analyze the root cause and reduce the MTTR (mean time to resolution). A CMDB (configuration management database) provides context for better ticket handling because it associates the right asset with the right ticket. It also maintains asset relationships and auto-discovery mechanisms. Another feature that can come in handy during the investigation and diagnosis phase is the knowledge base. A knowledge base is a rich repository of information, especially solutions that can be instrumental in improving FCR (first contact resolution). During this phase, notifications can help IT teams to stay informed and take quick action. This process is automated, and templates can be personalized and configured for the relevant channels.
5. Incident resolution and closure
The faster an issue is resolved, the quicker service can be recovered. There are a few things to help ensure swift resolution, like automated notifications and a survey that can help improve customer satisfaction. In case there is only a temporary workaround in place, the IT team can conduct a root cause analysis (RCA) to ensure a more permanent resolution. Some organizations also do a post-incident review to glean lessons learned, so they can handle it even better the next time.
Once an incident has been resolved, it can be closed. One way to keep clear records is to ensure a systematic closure process. By configuring an automation rule in advance, IT teams can have tickets automatically closed based on certain conditions without investing the manual effort. IT can also let users close their own tickets on the self-service portal.
Incident management best practices can make a real difference in how well you resolve an incident. Here are a few key tips that incident managers recommend.
1. Use the Right Channels
Make sure that users report incidents using the appropriate channels (i.e., not by chasing IT team members down when they spot them in the hallway). Otherwise, you may struggle to properly capture all of the information needed about the incidents that are coming in, and you may also have trouble retaining valuable knowledge about how to resolve them. An incident management tool that has multi-channel capabilities makes this easier.
2. Classify, Categorize, and Prioritize
Once an incident comes in, you’ve got to tag it appropriately in order to move it through the pipeline to resolution. Specify whether it’s an incident, a service request, or a major incident. Also note the asset or assets linked to the incident, the priority level of the asset(s) involved, the business impact, the user’s name and their priority level.
3. Save Time with Automation
Your IT team has enough on its plate without having to worry about figuring out who’s supposed to get that ticket that just came in. Use automation to automatically assign tickets to the right IT specialists, escalate issues when necessary, and keep users updated on the progress of their requests.
4. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Although IT usually just wants to resolve the incident as it comes in, users really, really care about being kept in the loop while it’s being investigated. It’s not really possible to over-communicate, so make sure to keep all the relevant stakeholders updated as you’re guiding your incident to resolution. This will go a long way toward improving user satisfaction and earning positive NPS scores for IT.
An incident response plan helps you properly manage your incidents right through to completion. It comes in especially handy when managing security incidents that could put the business, its employees, and its customers at risk. An incident response plan usually includes the following six stages:
1. Prepare
As you might have guessed, this is the step where you create the incident response plan itself. It can also include the measures you take to prepare your company to handle incidents in general—whether that’s a minor issue like a printer not printing or something far more serious, like a cyber attack.
2. Identify
Next comes the identification stage. Once you’ve detected an incident, either by having your monitoring software automatically flag it or having had a user report it, it’s time to identify the type of incident you’re dealing with and figure out how severely it could impact your business. At this point, you’ll also want to gather more information about the incident and specify who from the IT team will be responsible for responding to it (for example, using a RACI matrix)
3. Contain
Of course, you want to contain your incident before it gets out of hand and disrupts the business even further. So, once you know what you’re dealing with and who from your team is dealing with it, you should take steps to limit the incident’s potential impact and make sure you’re in full control of your systems. The steps you take at this stage of your incident response plan may vary depending on the type of incident you’re experiencing.
4. Eradicate
Once you’ve got things under control, it’s time to eradicate the incident once and for all. Here, too, the specific steps your IT team takes to accomplish this task may be different depending on the type of incident you’re addressing. For example, they might be fixing code, deleting compromised accounts, or adjusting cloud security settings.
5. Recover
Now you’re on the road to recovery. At this stage of your incident response plan, you’re bringing the affected system, device, or service back to its normal state of operations. This could involve installing a patch, restoring data using a backup, or rebuilding a system. If you’re grappling with a larger issue, eradication could be considered a part of your recovery process, which might involve a phased approach toward getting back to normal.
6. Reflect on lessons learned
Once you’re in the clear, you can reflect on what you learned from the incident. Most businesses formally document this step by outlining the cause of the incident and describing the steps their IT pros took to remediate it. They usually bring the relevant members of the IT team together to discuss the incident, highlighting any valuable lessons learned that will allow them to get even better at handling such incidents in the future.
There are a variety of incident management solutions out there. Figuring out which one is best for your needs may be tricky when there are so many options to pick from. Here are some pointers on how to choose incident management software for your business.
1. User-friendly with multi-channel support: Incident management software should be user-friendly and accessible. Its design should be intuitive, so even non-IT employees have a good experience using it. Your incident management software should enable self-service, so the end user can file tickets via a convenient portal. It should also be able to handle multi-channel support via email, phone, chatbot, mobile app, feedback widgets, walk-ups, or other methods. Whenever possible, it should automatically log incidents as tickets, so your IT team doesn’t have to.
2. Powered by automation: Manual and simple tasks can be replaced by automation for a quicker and more efficient ticket resolution process. AI routes tickets to the right person or team based on a round-robin or load-balancing rules, and it can also prioritize those tickets based on impact and urgency. Automation is a great way to put a unified process in place to meet the service demands of employees. This also saves time for your IT teams, since they will no longer be preoccupied with routine manual tasks and can prioritize more important activities. As a result, tickets will be closed faster, and the business will operate more smoothly.
3. A unified dashboard: With a streamlined dashboard, you can achieve visibility into all your incidents and track their progress toward resolution. This also helps you to collaborate with your team from a single screen and know who’s working on a ticket, its priority, and its status. If a member of your IT team is out sick, you’ll be able to see what they’ve done on a particular ticket so far and even re-assign it to someone else, if needed. Meanwhile, service desk reporting features help you monitor performance and identify ways to improve IT service delivery.
4. Alerts and notifications: Users really, really (really) want and expect regular updates after they’ve reported an incident, so make sure your incident management software supports real-time alerts and notifications. While they are especially important in industries like mining or energy, they’re useful for all industries and fields. Alerts and notifications keep everyone involved up to date on the incident’s progress, which in turn helps the IT team keep its response systematic and organized.
5. Robust knowledge base: Users appreciate having self-service tools for resolving incidents when they can. For example, users can find the answers to their own problems by performing a simple search without having to wait for a technician to get back to them. IT support professionals can also use it to look up insight on how to resolve an incident. A knowledge base is especially helpful if you support users that are working from home, but it can also be a win for IT because it reduces the volume of incoming tickets.
6. Integrations with other software: Make sure your incident management software is compatible with other systems and applications your company uses, such as on-call management and IT asset management (ITAM), so employees can get accustomed to the new incident management solution more easily. Whether it’s for communication purposes, for using data, or for change requests or notifications, it’s handy when your service desk’s tools can talk to other business software or applications.
7. Compatible with mobile devices: Most users want to be able to access their incident management tool via their smartphones. So, your incident management solution should be compatible with the kinds of mobile devices they already use, such as Android and iOS phones. This mobile compatibility is especially important for companies that support remote workforces because it allows users to track the progress of their tickets from anywhere. It’s also clutch in an emergency.
As we know incident management is the process that is responsible for proper logging, analyzing, and (especially) resolving incidents. Its primary objective is to help resume service operations as quickly as possible. Why is Freshservice the right tool for incident management? It helps Track, prioritize, and assign tickets effortlessly, and automate resolution processes to drive efficiency. Some incident management features within Freshservice are:
1. Enable multichannel support: Enable end-users to reach support via multiple channels such as email, a self-service portal, mobile app, phone, Freddy chatbot, feedback widgets, or walk-ups.
2. Categorize and prioritize tickets with automation: Automatically categorize tickets based on historical ticket data with Freddy, the Freshservice AI engine. Automate ticket prioritization with powerful workflow automation based on impact and urgency. Auto-assign tickets to the right agents or groups, and ensure no ticket falls through the cracks with round-robin or load balancing auto-assignment.
3. Get a bird’s eye view of your service desk: Get visibility into all your tickets and track their progress with a quick glance at the dashboard.
4. Speed up resolution time and improve service with a knowledge base: Freshservice has a rich repository of information that can serve as solutions to incidents and problems and can be used by both end-users and IT support agents.
Get started with your incident management journey today. Try Freshservice free for 14 days to get exclusive access to these features and more.
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