ABOUT

The use of different spreadsheets to store incidents from different agencies across the country is an inefficient way for the Manager to be able to view all the incidents as a single spreadsheet. All agencies store numerous and different information about incidents on separate spreadsheets thereby making it is very tedious to view them as one common spreadsheet.

This is a system capable of offering Incident Management as a service to the users. It provides various functionalities such as editing tables, deleting tables, storing tables , adding new data and lot more.

Description of Incidents

There are 3 types of incidents, which are major, repetitive and complex incidents.

1. Major Incidents: Large-scale incidents may not come up too often, but when they do hit, organizations need to be prepared to deal with them quickly and efficiently. For example, a situation in which an overnight server restart leads to app login problems for hundreds of users can have a huge impact on the business. As employees try to get to work the next day, they are left unable to get the job done because they are stuck waiting for the help desk team to reset login information and get updates out to users.
2. Repetitive Incidents: Some incidents just keep coming up, regardless of what you do to resolve them. In many cases, these incidents are a sign of underlying problems in your IT configuration. However, if you are not in a place where problem management will work for your business, you must be prepared to use incident management to resolve these issues effectively. Without incident management, your support team is likely stuck dealing with these incidents each time they come up, and hopefully remember what they did the last time so they can solve the issue quickly. An incident management platform can integrate with knowledge management systems to identify repetitive incidents and give users the information they need to resolve them quickly. I
3. Complex Incidents: Most of the incidents that come to the help desk are fairly simple. As such, your engineer can go into the ticket, find a resolution and notify the user. However, the occasional complex incident puts a major roadblock in this workflow. The support ticket will need to be opened and analyzed by the technician, and upon realizing that the issue is too complex, the user will need to pass the ticket up to an engineer. These transitions can 21 cause incidents to slip through the cracks, or take incredibly long to resolve, if you are working with a homegrown system. A dedicated incident management platform features the combination of workflow optimization, notifications and incident tracking functions you need to handle complex incidents without running into trouble.

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT PROCESS

Incident management processes are the procedures and actions taken to respond to and resolve incidents.

This includes who is responsible for response, how incidents are detected and communicated to IT teams, and what tools are used.

While incident management can get extremely complicated, the steps can be broken down into the following five steps:

Step 1: Incident Identification

It may seem obvious, but identifying an incident is the first step in incident management. To do so, you’ll need to figure out what defines an event in your team’s eyes. When your service suffers an unexpected interruption or deterioration in quality, it is referred to as an incident. Since each organization, as well as its infrastructure and applications, is unique, it’s critical to think about the various types of issues you can encounter.

Step 2: Incident Logging

The next step is to properly log and track the incident after it has been detected. An incident can be logged through phone calls, emails, SMS, web forms published on the self-service portal or via live chat messages.

Step 3: Incident Categorization

The next step is to properly log and track the incident after it has been detected. Incidents can be categorized and sub-categorized based on the area of IT or business that the incident causes a disruption in like network, hardware etc. This is critical because every incident should have at least one category (such as “Network”) and subcategory (such as “Network Outage”) assigned to it. Instead of having to dig through a sea of uncategorized tickets, your service desk 22 will be able to effortlessly navigate through all incidents based on their categories and subcategories.

Step 4: Incident Prioritization

Prioritizing incidents based on their severity will clearly distinguish between large incidents that must be resolved immediately and lesser incidents that have a much longer resolution period. The extent of the impact on users and their ability to use the service will determine the priority and urgency of an incident.

In most cases, incidents are prioritized as follows:

Low-priority Incidents – There are no service interruptions for users.

Medium-priority Incidents – Some internal employees have been impacted. However, users have had little to no downtime.

High-priority Incidents – A large number of users are experiencing service interruptions and quality reductions. High-priority incidents frequently have unfavorable financial consequences for the company.

Step 5: Incident Response and closure

It’s time to respond to an incident after it’s been identified, logged, categorized, and prioritized.

First, your service desk will need to make an initial diagnostic, which will include a detailed description of the problem and answers to troubleshooting questions. Your service desk will evaluate whether or not an incident escalation is required once the situation has been diagnosed. When advanced assistance is required to resolve an issue, an escalation is initiated, and the incident is allocated to the relevant team.

The incident will then be investigated and diagnosed by the appointed team. After confirming the initial event hypothesis, this is usually done during the troubleshooting phase. Your team will apply the necessary fix, such as a software patch, a change in settings, new hardware, and so on, once a diagnosis has been determined. Finally, once an incident has been resolved, your team can close it.