- Technical debt and disparate systems are big constraints for most small enterprise (SE) organizations. What may have worked years ago is no longer fit for purpose or the business is growing faster than the current tools in place can handle.
- Super specialization of knowledge is also a common factor in smaller teams caused by complex architectures. While helpful, if that knowledge isn’t documented it can walk out the door with the resource and the rest of the team is left scrambling.
- Lessons learned may be gathered for critical incidents but often are not propagated, which impacts the ability to solve recurring incidents.
- Over time, repeated incidents can have a negative impact on the customer’s perception that the service desk is a credible and essential service to the business.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Go beyond the blind adoption of best-practice frameworks. No simple formula exists for improving incident management maturity. Identify the challenges in your incident lifecycle and draw on best-practice frameworks pragmatically to build a structured response to those challenges.
- Track, analyze, and review results of incident response regularly. Without a comprehensive understanding of incident trends and patterns you can be susceptible to recurring incidents that increase in damage over time. Make the case for problem management, and successfully reduce the volume of unplanned work by scheduling it into regular IT activity.
- Recurring incidents will happen; use runbooks for a consistent response each time. Save your organization response time and confusion by developing your own specific incident use cases. Incident response should follow a standard process, but each incident will have its own escalation process or call tree that identifies key participants.
Impact and Result
- Effective and efficient management of incidents involves a formal process of identifying, classifying, categorizing, responding, resolving, and closing of each incident. The key for smaller organizations, where technology or resources is a constraint, is to make the best practices usable for your unique environment.
- Develop a plan that aligns with your organizational needs, and adapt best practices into light, sustainable processes, with the goal to improve time to resolve, cost to serve, and ultimately, end-user satisfaction.
- Successful implementation of incident management will elevate the maturity of the service desk to a controlled state, preparing you for becoming proactive with problem management.
Incident Management for Small Enterprise Research & Tools
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement incident management, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
- Incident Management for Small Enterprise – Phases 1-3
1. Identify and log incidents
This phase will provide an overview of the incident lifecycle and an activity on how to classify the various types of incidents in your environment.
- Service Desk Standard Operating Procedure
- Incident Management Workflow Library (Visio)
- Incident Management Workflow Library (PDF)
2. Prioritize and define SLAs
This phase will help you develop a categorization scheme for incident handling that ensures success and keeps it simple. It will also help you identify the most important runbooks necessary to create first.
- Service Desk Ticket Categorization Schemes
- IT Incident Runbook Prioritization Tool
- IT Incident Management Runbook Blank Template
3. Respond, recover, and close incidents
This phase will help you identify how to use a knowledgebase to resolve incidents quicker. Identify what needs to be answered during a post-incident review and identify the criteria needed to invoke problem management.
- Knowledgebase Article Template
- Root-Cause Analysis Template
- Post-Incident Review Questions Tracking Tool
Workshop: Incident Management for Small Enterprise
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
1 Assess the Current State
The Purpose
Assess the current state of the incident management lifecycle within the organization.
Key Benefits Achieved
Understand the incident lifecycle and how to classify them in your environment.
Identify the roles and responsibilities of the incident response team.
Document the incident workflows to identify areas of opportunities.
Activities
1.1 Outline your incident lifecycle challenges.
1.2 Identify and classify incidents.
1.3 Identify roles and responsibilities for incident handling.
1.4 Design normal and critical incident workflows for target state.
Outputs
List of incident challenges for each phase of the incident lifecycle
Incident classification scheme mapped to resolution team
RACI chart
Incident Workflow Library
2 Define the Target State
The Purpose
Design or improve upon current incident and ticket categorization schemes, priority, and impact.
Key Benefits Achieved
List of the most important runbooks necessary to create first and a usable template to go forward with
Activities
2.1 Improve incident categorization scheme.
2.2 Prioritize and define SLAs.
2.3 Understand the purpose of runbooks and prioritize development.
2.4 Develop a runbook template.
Outputs
Revised ticket categorization scheme
Prioritization matrix based on impact and urgency
IT Incident Runbook Prioritization Tool
Top priority incident runbook
3 Bridge the Gap
The Purpose
Respond, recover, and close incidents with root-cause analysis, knowledgebase, and incident runbooks.
Key Benefits Achieved
This module will help you to identify how to use a knowledgebase to resolve quicker.
Identify what needs to be answered during a post-incident review.
Identify criteria to invoke problem management.
Activities
3.1 Build a targeted knowledgebase.
3.2 Build a post-incident review process.
3.3 Identify metrics to track success.
3.4 Build an incident matching process.
Outputs
Working knowledgebase template
Root-cause analysis template and post-incident review checklist
List of metrics
Develop criteria for problem management