Incident Management

Practical Case

The "Cater Matters" Service Desk has just received a call from the person in charge of supplies at one of its customer's canteens.

He says that although he had ordered a new batch of ice-creams a few days ago over the web, they had not yet arrived and the stock in the fridge was running low.

The Service Desk operator looks in the orders database and confirms that the order was made several days ago, but he also notices that it was incorrectly stored.

He tries to repeat the order on his computer, but the system continues to malfunction.

Following the established protocols, the operator then takes the following decisions:

• He evaluates its priority: although the impact is low, the incident is urgent as the customer needs the delivery urgently.
• He logs the details of the incident.
• He consults the Knowledge Base to investigate whether the incident is the result of a known error, and if there are any possible work-arounds.
• A temporary solution is proposed to the customer: he is pointed in the direction of a reserved area of the website where he can place "urgent" orders by email.
• He contacts the systems department to warn that the incident may be repeated throughout the morning.
• Using the application that monitors warehouse stock, he checks the availability of the ice-creams ordered.
• He reassures the customer that he will receive the ice-creams before midday via the company's express service.

Meanwhile, the systems department:

• Runs a series of tests and confirms that, in general, the system is functioning correctly.
• Are unable to identify the cause of the incident.
• They contact Service Desk and suggest that the problem be forwarded to Problem Management with a preliminary classification of low priority.

Service Desk receives the information and decides that:

• Given the low impact of the incident and the fact that the customer has been given a satisfactory work-around, it does not need to be escalated.
• They log the work-around for the incident together with the information provided by the systems department.
• The incident is closed.