Incident Management Best Practices
Learn how to effectively respond to incidents and ensure business continuity with these incident management best practices.
Learn how to effectively respond to incidents and ensure business continuity with these incident management best practices.
Incident management is one of the main processes in ITSM. It helps the IT system stay afloat while your support team fights issues caused by human error or rotten luck. However, because incident management involves multiple stages and is a customer-facing function, those starting it out as a separate process might experience enormous difficulties. Is the new team structure efficient? Should I add more people to the first-level support team? What stage of the incident management process is the most important one? These questions may be tough to answer with little experience. To help you, we’ve put together a list of incident management best practices that we consider essential for teams and companies when just establishing this process:
Below in this article, we went through these recommendations in more detail.
Think of the incident management process that makes sense to your company. Viewing incident management as a process with separate steps allows you to break down the complex process into smaller tasks and to understand better the tools needed to achieve the goal at each stage.
Come up with a unified approach to handling incidents: the order of necessary actions when dealing with them. A standard method may look like this (and we’ve broken it down into details in our article about incident management):
Incident management is all about following previously agreed procedures. As a result, one of the incident management best practices is preparing playbooks and guides for every scenario in advance.
Consider splitting all typical incidents into a few groups, each united by a similar resolution workflow. Such standard resolution approaches are called incident models. According to ITIL, these will include:
Companies treat incident models differently – some write them down as resolution guides, while others try to enhance incident classification to an extent where incidents of a particular class will go through a pre-defined process. If you want to automate part of the process, you will find our Alloy Navigator solution valuable, with its highly flexible workflow automation capabilities.
In IT support, the way you communicate with users is as crucial for the team’s reputation as the incident resolution rate. Solving the user’s problem is only possible in, like, 99% of cases. At the end of the day, some users come to IT support with bugs that are yet to be fixed in the next product updates. Others, even if they don’t realize it, request help without knowing what they actually want. However, even if you can’t solve the user’s problem, what you can do is be polite, friendly, and empathetic with the customer. Customer service practitioners argue this might be even more important for winning a client.
That is why we highly recommend paying more attention to the culture of customer service in your team. You could start by building a collection of example response messages for challenging situations. This helps your support staff be prepared and feel confident in situations like when the user is rude or when they receive an inquiry outside their area of responsibility. Moreover, standardizing replies will create a unified tone of voice across the whole support team. Here is a procedure that might work to get it started:
One of the widely accepted incident management best practices is the focus on the consistent documenting of incidents. This procedure is vital to later analyze incidents, for example, during a postmortem incident review.
Create a clear guideline on how to document the incidents. Discuss what you want to be included in an incident’s first-time log. Then, think about the formal descriptions for parameters like symptoms, the urgency level, and the incident category, which would be easy to remember.
Also, think about the parts of information that can be collected automatically. The intelligent ticket categorization and prioritization help Alloy Navigator handle this in the best way possible.
A multi-level support team structure allows one to sort requests and assign them to the agents based on their expertise. The first-level group (called L1) receives all incidents and helps users with general troubleshooting tips that work in most cases. Then, the incidents not resolved on the first level pass to second-level technicians (L2), that apply more sophisticated diagnosis and resolution techniques. In the rare cases when this doesn’t help, the third-level support experts (L3) jump in.
While your first-level and second-level support agents should be able to resolve most of the incidents, it’s essential to have experts with deep knowledge of special problems accessible. Apart from full-time employment, consider an option where they agree to help on-demand.
For the escalation mechanism to work smoothly, use incident management software to automate the routing of the requests. First, you’ll need to write down the roles and responsibilities of team members on paper. That will make it much easier to configure the software.
Apart from the issues reported by users, automatic system monitoring alerts might be of enormous help. When something goes wrong in the IT system, such monitoring tools identify this and send notifications to the stakeholders. In modern incident management software, the configuration of the alerts is flexible: you can add alerts for special triggers and remove those already existing if it’s more convenient for you. It’ll enable you to focus on things that really matter instead of receiving tons of notifications that don’t bring any value to your area of responsibility.
Ensure that your requesters are informed on every step of the incident resolution process. Look at these tips on how to implement this idea using Alloy Navigator: