Incident management involves establishing a set of actions and procedures so you can quickly resolve and respond to incidents in your organization. To effectively resolve incidents, you will want to have an understanding of how you detect these problems and what tools will be used to resolve it. Your team can follow a few tips to ensure you define a more effective process, allowing the team to reliably adopt the process.
Supporting Employees
You will want to train your employees on using the right incident management tool, as offering the proper training will benefit the process at all levels. Of course, your help desk team should have in-depth training, but it’s a good idea to train even end user employees. They should know how to find and report issues to the help desk. That allows the help desk team to respond as quickly as possible so any down time is as short as possible. Once your team has the proper training, they will be more efficient when working with each other. Plus, they will be able to use your tools better.
Send the Right Alerts Out to the Team
The team should receive important alerts about issues at hand. However, it’s a good idea to avoid overloading them with too many irrelevant ones. If the team is overwhelmed with alerts, they will be distracted from the task at hand, causing an increased response time going forward. Instead, carefully consider how your team will categorize various events, and what these categories will mean for your alerts.
As you come up with an incident alert process, you might decide to first define the indicators of the service level. You might want to determine a hierarchy of functioning processes. For example, some teams might choose to prioritize fixing the root cause instead of the symptom of the issue. So, it would be better to send one alert that a server is down instead of half a dozen alerts for each service that relies on the server.
Always Being on Call
For effective incident management, it’s important to understand who will respond to each alert as they come in. You might want to create an on-call schedule so someone with the right permissions and skills is available. This process will also ensure that any issue is escalated if necessary. You could determine who will be on-call based on how much work was done during a shift. It will prevent everyone from becoming overwhelmed. For example, if someone responded to several difficult issues while at work, someone else should be on-call to avoid causing that teammate from becoming overwhelmed.
Your team should follow communication best practices, whether working in an office or remotely. That will help them be more effective and collaborate better. The guidelines you put in place should let them know how to document communications and what channels to use. One of the benefits of this is that it can prevent unnecessary frustration. This process can also help your team pass on information without losing any important messages.
Streamlining Any Changes
Depending on your systems and the skill of your team, you might want to confirm any changes that require a response. You don’t want any harmful changes to be enacted or have to wait for approval. A solution can be to determine the kinds of changes individual end users can make and who will approve them if necessary. Some companies have a change advisory board to approve any changes, so you will want to ensure they are available to do that. If they don’t have availability that matches your team’s, you might consider having some override procedures so no excessive damage is done.