Most business owners already understand the pain of a failing IT service. If your app or IT infrastructure is down, then you can lose a lot of potential revenue. It will also hurt your business reputation. The incident management process will help you in running your IT infrastructure again in a few minutes. Knowledge of Incident management is important for every business. It will help you in protecting your business from IT incidents. This will ensure that your business is always up and running. In this article, we are going to talk about incident management.
What is Incident Management?
Many business owners think that incident management is related to HR departments and resolving conflicts. Conflict resolution is a small part of incident management strategy. Incident management mainly focuses on the development and IT operations.
This concept was introduced after the introduction of ITIL or Information Technology Infrastructure Library. ITIL is a set of practices and standards that companies can follow for ITSM. Incident management is simply a set of processes that you can use for minimizing downtime.
An incident simply refers to any unexpected disruption which can affect your business. It will disturb your daily business operations. Thus, it will lead to a loss of productivity. If your assets are not working properly, then it will cause a disruption for your business. The Wi-Fi problem, laptop issues, and network failure are common examples of the incident.
Importance of Incident management
Incident management processes will help your IT teams in quickly addressing issues. It will help your IT team in resolving issues. This will reduce the impact of downtime on your business. You also have to collect data like what went wrong and why it went wrong. Also, you will mention the fixes in a document. This will ensure that your organization can avoid the same problem in the future.
Your IT team can use an incident management system for creating a quick response to every Issue. This will help your team in saving a lot of resources and time. It will ensure that your users are happy. You can speed up your resolution and response times.
According to a report from Gartner, businesses can lose about $300k per hour due to downtime. You will lose a lot of revenue due to this. If you are providing Service level agreements to your customers, then you will be liable for the breach. Your organization will also waste a lot of resources and time for setting up an incident management process. The incident management process will provide long-lasting benefits to your business.
Incident management process
The incident management process will look different for every organization. However, there are some key elements that you should cover in every incident management process. We are going to talk about the key elements of the incident management process in this article.
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Before the incident
The best way to avoid downtime is by preparing in advance. Make sure that you already have a management process. You should do practice tests and drills for ensuring that your team is ready for incidents. Make sure that you are performing these drills for different types of issues.
Businesses should invest in setting up a dedicated team for monitoring possible incidents. This will ensure that they can quickly detect incidents. Your IT help desk should get the incident reports from users. Other members of IT and DevOps teams can collect data. This data will help your IT team in monitoring your system health. If various people are monitoring your IT infrastructure, then it will help you in catching incidents. This will help you in reducing downtime.
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During the incident
You can follow the below steps for ensuring a successful and quick resolution:
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Incident logging and identification:
You need to first identify the incident. The help desk agent or end-user can help you in this process. They can identify the incident and report it to your team. You can collect data related to the incident by using manual identification, solution analyses, and standard reports.
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Categorization:
You need to first gather data from different sources. After that, you need to focus on categorizing this data properly. This will ensure that your future agents can easily find this data. It will also help you in prioritizing your response resources. This will help your team in saving a lot of time and resources.
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Escalation and Notification:
You might need to escalate a few incidents. Notification is not required for smaller incidents. You can quickly solve them. However, larger incidents will need escalation to senior team members. You also need to send alerts and notifications to your customers and clients.
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Investigation:
Your team will focus on analyzing the incident. They will try to find the root cause of the incident. Your IT team can work with other teams for an effective troubleshooting and investigation process. Collaboration can help your IT team in reducing their efforts.
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Resolution:
You need to first investigate and diagnose the incident. After that, you need to shift your focus to recovery and resolution. This is the step where you can find the root causes of incidents. It will also help you in addressing future threats. Your IT teams also want to ensure that similar incidents can be avoided in the future.
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Closure:
You need to close the incident after the issue is successfully resolved. This is where your IT team will send an official closure notice and report to your managers and stakeholders. You will also close the help desk ticket if it is opened. The closure will also help you in analyzing the steps that you have taken for resolving the issue. It will help you in improving your response in the future. This will help you in taking preventative measures for avoiding similar incidents in the future. Many businesses try to avoid this step. However, this is the most important step as it will help you in avoiding future errors.
Advantages of Incident managementÂ
Some of the main advantages of incident management are:
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Good Service Quality
You need to decide the priority of the issue when the ticket has been generated. The priority can be assigned from low to extreme. This will help you in solving critical issues first. It will help you in improving the response team. Your IT staff can provide good service quality to your customers and clients.
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Increased productivity
Incident management software will help you in increasing your profitability. It will help you in enhancing the efficiency of your assets. Incident management software will help you in using a specific procedure for every type of incident. You don’t need to worry about making any assumptions. It will help you in taking the right steps for rectifying the issue. Thus, a good Incident management process will help you in increasing your business productivity.
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User Satisfaction
A good Incident management process will help you in solving your client problems effectively and quickly. This will ensure that your IT staff can quickly resolve your user tickets. It will help you in increasing user satisfaction. Your users will provide a good review.
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ITSM documentation
Your shareholders need data as proof that your software is helping you in reducing the restoration time. You can create this documentation by using the complaint ticketing system.
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Scope of improvement
A good Incident management plan will help you in getting various details about every detail. You can check how much time it takes to resolve a ticket. This data will help you in improving your IT help desk support. It will help you in finding resources that you can use for closing the ticket quickly.
Best tips and practices for Incident Management
There are various ways to streamline and improve your incident management process. You can follow some key steps for improving your incident management process. Some of the best tips and practices that you can follow for making your incident management system effective are:
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Create a communication strategy
Timelines are generally rushed when you have to resolve tickets. The best way to improve this process is by creating good communication stress. This will help you in avoiding stressful moments. You don’t need to worry about any misunderstanding and confusion. Your communication strategy should mention the methods and channels of communication that you can use for resolving and updating incidents. It should also include a strategy for doing internal and external communication. A good communication strategy will help you in keeping a record of valuable data. This will ensure that you can use this data for future use.
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Assign clear responsibilities and roles
Your team should know what they have to do when an incident occurs. Thus, you have to assign clear roles and responsibilities to your employees. If your team is trying to quickly solve an issue, then it can lead to new issues. You don’t want your team to wait for approval when they have to fix some issue. Make sure that your IT team knows about their roles and responsibilities. This will help you in ensuring that your IT team can quickly do their work.
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Automation
If you want to optimize your incident management process, then you should go with automation. Try to automate as many things as you can. This will help you in reducing the chance of human errors. Closure reports, email notifications, and some other things of your process can be automated. You can use AI and Machine learning for automating your incident management process. This will help you in freeing up your resources and team. Your team will have more time to work on their tasks.
For example, most software developers are using Jira for managing their work. You should set up a communication channel between Jira and Zendesk. This will help you in creating tickets in the Zendesk. An AI bot can be used for creating a ticket directly in the Jira. You don’t need to worry about manually creating the same tickets in the Jira. Companies are also using AI tools like chatbots for helping their customers. Chatbots can provide answers to your customers and users. They will provide a self-serve option to your customers. This will help your users in troubleshooting simple and minor incidents. Your IT team doesn’t need to worry about solving simple incidents. This will save your service team effort and time.
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Accessibility
The incident management process will be useless if you can’t access the process. Make sure that your customers can easily access your contact page and help desk. Try to provide multiple communication channels to your customers. Some people love using their phones only while others still love communicating by email. Thus, you need to provide all the communication channels to your customers.
Make sure that the processes and tools that you are using can be easily accessed. Your team should help you in onboarding new management platforms and new software. This will ensure that you can use these tools efficiently.
Conclusion
Security issues, website outages, and IT problems can be harmful to your business. This can lead to downtime. Thus, you can lose a lot of potential revenue and clients. It is not possible to avoid every incident. Companies should be ready for every type of incident. This can be done by creating an incident management process. It will help you in reducing the impact of these incidents. You can minimize the downtime by using your incident management plan.
However, you will need a service team for executing your plan. Most SMBs don’t have access to a large IT or service team. Thus, you should consider working with a good MSP. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire will help you in creating an incident management plan. They will help you in recovering your business from an incident. You don’t need to worry about any IT issues as Bleuwire will help you in solving them. They have access to the best IT professionals. Thus, you don’t need to worry about hiring IT professionals for solving your simple IT issues. If you need more information regarding IT services, then you can contact Bleuwire.
Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™ services and solutions in how we can help your business.
