Incident management is a process to handle the issues reported by users, in the most efficient manner. Although most of the large organizations have already placed one or other mechanism to deal with such incident processes, however, it is important for the organizations to evaluate the entire incident management lifecycle and process to ensure that the right processes are in place to handle issues in the most efficient and faster manner. As technology is moving faster than ever before, similarly ITSM products are adding up new features and functionalities to help organizations to deal with incidents. Below are the key parameters, against which the Incident management process of any organization can be evaluated.
Supported Channels for Incident Creation
Reporting the incident in a faster manner helps to reduce the TAT for the incident, therefore it is important to look into the various channels which can be used to report the incident in real time. It enables users to choose the right way to log the incident. The most common channels are Email to ticket conversion, Using the user portal, SSO with other platforms such as O365, GSuite etc., Ticket logging by Chat-Bot, and Manual ticket creation by technician.
Ability to Capture Important Information
While logging the incident by the user, it has been observed in the past that relevant information has not been provided by the user which could be useful for support teams to understand the issue in detail. Hence ITSM tool should have provision to capture all the relevant information such as appropriate category, sub-category, asset details, warranty details etc... With the help of ITSM tools, organizations can create custom templates for the tickets which can be used by the users and fill in all the relevant information automatically at the time of ticket creation.
Auto-Categorization & Auto-Assign
Putting the incident into the right bucket is very important to avoid unnecessary delays in resolving the incident. If the user is using the portal to log the incident, templates can be used to raise the incident but, in the email,-to-ticket scenario, it is a tedious task to manually assign the categories/sub-categories. ITSM tools can help in doing the auto-categorization by analyzing the ticket contents using machine learning capability. ITSM should be able to assign the incident automatically to concerned support teams after categorization.
Closer Look at Remaining or Elapsed Time
While every incident is bound to be closed within SLA timelines, it is important to keep track of timelines during the incident lifecycle. If timelines are not being tracked, there are chances of breach of SLA timelines. ITSM tools now provide the capability to support teams to look into the timelines in terms of how much time is remaining as per SLA and severity of tickets and if ticket timelines are breached what is the overdue time. With the latest ITSM tools it is now possible to define the timelines at the granular level which includes office timings based on different locations, based on different holiday calendars etc.
Auto-Escalations & Notifications
While timelines can be tracked, the ITSM tool should also provide the capability to automatically escalate the incident ticket to higher authorities based on the time elapsed on ticket. ITSM tool should provide the notifications at various stages such as escalation notification, ticket status change notification, ticket closure notification etc.
Diagnosis & Resolution
While an incident ticket captures the symptoms, issue details etc. at the time of ticket creation, the ITSM tool should also provide the capability to support teams to capture more details such as how the diagnosis has been performed, which kind of solutions have been tried or applied or what was the root cause analysis for a particular incident. This information helps other support team members to look into similar resolved tickets in future for faster resolution of incidents.
Self-Healing
Managing the incident lifecycle is important but IT leaders should also look into various ways to reduce the no. of incidents in the organization. Self-heal bundled with automation scripts can help users to fix their issues automatically or using the right IT Asset Management tool, issues can be automatically detected and based on predefined conditions, and those issues can be fixed automatically. Organizations can use custom scripts based on the type of incidents in their organization. Self-heal functionality can reduce the no. of incident tickets up to 30% and helps to reduce the workload at the support desk.
Ability to mark FCR, Impacted CIs, Major Incident etc.
Apart from the basic classification based on category, severity etc. ITSM tool should also be able to mark the ticket for FCR (First Call Resolution), Major Incident or Impacted Cis/Business Services. This helps IT leaders to look into actionable intelligent and plan for continuous improvement of IT Support Services.
