ITIL Incident Management Process

What's ITIL?

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.

ITIL Incident Management

What's the ITIL Incident Management Process?

The process is the actual adoption of ITIL into a practical framework. It is a way to ensure effective IT service delivery by the organization to meet their client’s needs when an incident occurs. The process focuses solely on handling and escalating incidents as they occur to restore defined service levels. The process does not consider root cause analysis or resolving deeper issues. Instead, it focuses on process and issue resolution.

Once the ITIL incident management process has been established, it provides significant and consistent value for the company. It creates a framework that provides rapid resolution of issues. It allows incidents to be resolved in time-frames previously unseen. For most organizations, the process moves support from back-and-forth emailing to a formal ticketing system with prioritization, categorization and SLA requirements.

For example, prior to adopting the process, businesses might use email to receive and resolve issues sent to their IT desk. Emails are not always threaded and responses can fall off.

However, once an ITIL process has been established, the organization will likely move toward a robust process of ticketing and alerting.

When incidents occur, a ticket will be created to establish a record and indicate that the help desk has received notice of the problem. If the IT deterioration is significant and critical, a prominent and persistent alert notification should be forwarded to the developer or operations person best able to resolve the issue.

How Does the Process Work?

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

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
An incident is identified and logged
Templates are used to categorize the issue
The issue is prioritized based on severity and impact on the business
Initial diagnosis is made on the issue. Can the service desk agent resolve the issue?
Issue is escalated if more technical expertise is required to resolve the issue
Investigation and diagnosis of the issue
Resolution and recovery. Issue is resolved and service levels are returned to expected levels of performance
Incident closure
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.

ITIL Incident Management

What're ITIL Incident Management Process Best Practices?

For the process to work, there must be buy-in from executives, managers, programmers and IT support teams.

Ideally, there will be a manager, whose role is to oversee the ITIL process and ensure the needs of the various sides are met. The manager will also be tasked with implementing updates along the way and keeping the service desk apprised of SLAs and their updates.

For the ITIL service manager to be effective, they should consider implementing the following best practices:

1 - Understand Current Management Process

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.

Understand current management process

2 - Establish a Vision for the ITIL Incident Management Process

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.

a vision for the ITIL Incident Management Process

3 - Gap Analysis

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.

Gap analysis

4 - Create a Road Map

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.

Create a road map

5 - Begin Project Implementation

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.

project implementation

ITIL Incident Management

How Does an ITIL Process Align With the Service Desk?

Depending on the organization where ITIL is implemented, a dedicated IT staff might be the first line of defense in managing IT issues. In many organizations, the service desk is tasked with this role. Service desks (also known as Tier 1 support) are often staffed 24/7 and are able to manage the majority of user problems and issues.

Issues that the service desk might handle are:
• Password resets
• Inability to access applications
• Error messages
• Common workflow failures

If the issue is more serious such as failure of a key API or a downed server, the ticket would be escalated to the next service level. A critical issue like an API failure should have escalation associated with critical alerting functionalities so that the issue is resolved in a quick manner and SLAs are respected.

How Does OnPage Fit Into the ITIL Incident Management Process?

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.

ITIL Incident Management