Incident Management

Process Control

Preparing reports correctly is an essential part of the Incident Management process.

These reports must provide essential information, for example, for:

• Service Level Management: it is essential that customers have timely information about the level of compliance with SLAs and that corrective measures are taken in the event of non-compliance.
• Monitoring the performance of the Service Desk: determining the degree of satisfaction of the customer from the service delivered and supervising proper functioning of the first line of support and customer care.
• Optimising the allocation of resources: managers need to know if the escalation process has followed the established protocols faithfully and if duplication has been avoided in the management process.
• Identifying mistakes: it may happen that the specified protocols are not right for the organisation's structure or the customer's needs, meaning that corrective measures need to be taken.
• Availability of Statistical Information: which may be used to make future projections about the assignment of resources, additional costs associated with the service, etc.

Also, proper Incident Management requires infrastructure enabling it to be implemented correctly. This includes:

• A proper automated system to handle relationships with customers and for logging incidents.
• A knowledge base (KB) allowing new incidents to be compared with logged and resolved incidents. An up-to-date (KB) allows:
  • Unnecessary escalation to be avoided.
  • Engineers' know-how to be turned into a lasting asset for the company.
  • Some or all of this data to be made directly available to customers (in the form of a FAQ) on the Extranet. This can mean that sometimes the user does not even need to report the incident.
• A CMDB allowing all the current configurations and the impact these can have on resolving the incident to be determined.
  

To monitor the process correctly it is indispensable to use metrics allowing the functioning of the service to be evaluated as objectively as possible. Some of the key aspects to consider are:

• Number of provisionally classified incidents and their priorities.
• Resolution times classified according to the incidents' impact and urgency.
• Level of compliance with the SLA.
• Associated costs.
• Use of available resources in the Service Desk.
• Percentage of incidents, classified by priorities, resolved in the first instance by the Service Desk.
• The customer's level of satisfaction.