Original post in Brazillian portuguese bye Emerson Dorow. He authorized me to post in english language.
http://www.profissionaisti.com.br/2009/01/gestao-incidentes-itil/
Continuing our 10 processes and 1 function of ITIL, today on one of the main processes of the service desk, which is often the first to be implemented: Incident Management.
An incident is any event that made unavailable in totally or parcially a service: A crash in database, a system out of order, slow network and others. The process of Incidend Management is responsible for restoring as fast as possible a service or an incident with minimal impact to the business. Here’s an example: There is a server running a database that is ERP-based of a company XYZ, and suddenly the database crashes due to lack of disk space. The Incident management in this case would be responsible for freeing disk space, so that the database could return to operate.
Then you might ask: how to ensure that this will not happen again? As said, the mission of incident management is to restore service as quickly as possible. To investigate the cause of the event and take steps to prevent this from occurring again are the responsibility of Problem Management and Capacity Management , so in this case the Incident Management team would inform the Problem Management team about the capacity problem. The important thing is to keep in mind that the Incident Management is concerned to restore service as quickly as possible. It is the mission of the Incident Management the activities described in the post about Service Desk. The Incident Management is the process of service desk that is more visible to users because it is usually the first point of contact between users and IT staff.
An important item in the record of incidents is their classification. You can create levels of criticality to the incidents based on impact (how many people / systems are being affected) and on urgency (how quickly must be restored) of the event. On this basis, it becomes clear what needs to be scheduled first. Attention on the issue of impact and urgency: an incident that impacts the work of one person may be more critical than an incident that impacts ten! An example: the implementation of the billing month is in trouble, and only one person is responsible for this task, this can be considered more urgent than ten people who can not access a public folder on your file server.
If your IT department works with some kind of SLA (service level agreement), the Incident Management is responsible to warn its superiors (the hierarchy) and/or the Level of service Management team that an incident will be solved within time X, or the contracted time, so that it can take steps to ensure that IT is not penalized by the time of service above the agreed
It is interesting to be created a Database Setup system along with the implementation of Incidemt Management. A Database Setup is a “map” that contains the IT assets and their relationships, almost like an inventory of company assets, this is important because:
- It makes the determination of impact and urgency of an incident is faster;
- Facilitates to know where the fault in service may be;
- Help to assess the impact of a software update and/or hardware.
To always keep the Database Setup system updated, it is important the implementation of Change Management, or at least a control on where any change in the structure is informed to the person responsible for updating it. The Database Setup system can be from its own software for this purpose or even an Excel spreadsheet. Al this is done because analyzing an incident on a configuration item (hub, switch, hardware) that no longer exists in the structure, hinders and delays the resolution of the incident!
Along with the Database Setup system it’s important to have knowledge base fo an effective Incident Management , this is important because:
- Will store Known Errors, workarounds and resolutions;
- Will help resolve incidents more quickly because the solution of many incidents may already be registered.
As last remark: Register everything!
Thanks!
