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Businesses run into many problems. It’s the job of good managers to solve issues quickly and efficiently. Usually, a problem is nothing more than an unknown root cause of one or more incidents. For instance, a flawed web server can be tagged as an incident as well. By flawed, we mean that it’s still working, but not as it should. It also poses a risk of complete failure as well. The problem that lurks behind an incident such as a flawed network could be a misconfigured router.
What Involves Incident Management?
So, if you have been asking yourself what is incident management, well, it’s something that focuses on short-term solutions and on doing all that is necessary in order to restore the service. Incident management is not focused on completing a root cause analysis in order to identify the reasons for which an incident has occurred.
Incident Management Priorities
Here are the main areas and priorities for incident management for IT teams:
- An effective response which leads to faster recovery in order to define who is accountable for what happened
- Clear communication with the stakeholders, service owners, customers and whoever is part of the organization
- The efficient collaboration that will lead to solving the issue faster and easier as a team and remove all the barriers that prevent the team from collaborating and sharing
- Continuous improvement so that the team will be able to learn from what happened and apply the lessons learned in order to improve a service or even refine the whole process in the future so that things can be fixed even easier when something similar occurs
Speed Is Essential In Incident Management
Speed has an increased importance in incident management and the Mean Time To Resolution MTTR will have to be recorded and measured. It’s critical to know the exact time that it takes for the team to find and fix business process issues because otherwise, you will not be able to improve the time. The importance of MTTR is acknowledged, and there are also a few obstacles to effective management. Here are the most common ones:
Data Channel Connectivity
To better understand this, consider a situation in which you have a team located in India and your U.S.-based squad should complement the hours that are not worked in India. It also goes the other way around. Data channel involves high costs, and the India team will compensate this by turning off their data channel and on again only when they are back in the office. This could trigger delays in receiving and responding to messages, and the final result is increased MTTR.
Lack of High Quality Monitoring Tools
An Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) incident management workflow will reduce downtime and negative impact. Without efficient ITSM practices, you will be unable to truly understand the monitoring system.
Lack Of Escalation
After an engineer has been alerted about the incident, they have no easy way to escalate the issue when they realize the problem. Effective measures involve bringing in more team members to help resolve the issue.
Scheduling Tools
Management is not able to coordinate who should be alerted based on the type of incident that occurred. The whole team will be alerted instead. Sometimes the development team can even get false positives, and they’ll start to ignore alerts which could lead to missing the critical ones.
Incident management can be improved with noise reduction that allows the team to focus on essential alerts, and by investing in automation because effective tools will save money spent on staff hours and avoid potential human mistakes.
