ITIL Incident Management Process

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is one of the the most popular approaches to IT service management (ITSM) and is used by many successful organizations. ITIL allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement and measure future business strategy. ITIL is often used to demonstrate compliance and measure improvement.

ITIL began as a response of the British government to the growing use of IT in the ’80s. Britain wanted a process and order surrounding the use of IT. The result of the British government’s efforts were a set of recommendations and standard practices for IT management.

To date, service operation has become the most essential element of ITIL. Service operations ensure that an agreed upon level of service and quality are achieved, thus laying the groundwork for excellence.

The ITIL incident management process is a series of defined steps. The steps are as follows:

1. The service provider and customer create a service level agreement (SLA) between them that defines the path for incident priorities, escalation paths and response times
2. An incident is identified and logged
3. Templates are used to categorize the issue
4. The issue is prioritized based on severity and impact on the business
5. Initial diagnosis is made on the issue. Can the service desk agent resolve the issue?
6. Issue is escalated if more technical expertise is required to resolve the issue
7. Investigation and diagnosis of the issue
8. Resolution and recovery. Issue is resolved and service levels are returned to expected levels of performance
9. Incident closure
10. Customer survey or internal survey to determine user satisfaction. This step enables the virtuous process of improvement to continue

These steps are important in creating a clear incident management process. Skipping the steps in an attempt to resolve the issue more quickly can lead to overwhelming IT teams and hurting SLAs.

In order to change the process, it is important to have the original process mapped out and understood. In particular, the deficiencies of the current process should be highlighted and examined for improvement.

The ITIL service manager should also establish the vision for what he or she desires the management process to look like. Ideally, the process will include a ticketing process to track when incidents arrive, are resolved and closed.

Additionally, incidents might require escalation. In the case of an escalation, there should be an alerting process to make sure that the escalation is heard and attended to.

After establishing an understanding of the current management process and establishing a vision, the ITIL service manager should identify what needs to be adjusted in the current process, what technologies need to be brought on and what competencies need to be hired.

Create a road map or project plan that will describe the timeline for getting from where the team is now to where it needs to go. Identify when key changes will take place and who will be impacted. Define actions or tasks and who is responsible for carrying it out and how long they will have.

After careful planning, it is time to begin project implementation. Keep track of where you are in the project and communicate successes along the way.

OnPage fosters team collaboration and automates the alerting process. OnPage’s incident alert management platform serves IT teams by incorporating ITSM alerts and incident management protocols defined by ITIL into their existing ITSM ecosystems. OnPage aids with faster incident resolution and uses real-time reporting to gain insights into alert volume and incident responder workloads.