About Basic Incident Management Workflow

From InSite

Users report Incidents and request service or services. Monitoring tools report Incidents. To understand Incident Management Workflow, you need to understand the following terms:

• An Incident is an unplanned interruption to an IT Service or a reduction in the Quality of an IT Service. Failure of a Configuration Item (CI) that has not yet impacted Service is also an Incident.

• A Service Request is a request from a user for information, or advice, or for a Standard Change or for Access to an IT Service. For example, a Service Request might be to reset a password, or to provide standard IT Services for a new user. Service Requests do not require an RFC to be submitted.
  
• Incident Management is the process for managing the Lifecycle of all Incidents. The primary objective of Incident Management is to return the IT Service to users as quickly as possible.
  

After a user calls or sends an email with a request for service, or after an Incident is reported by a monitoring tool, the Incident Management Workflow for the IT Help Desk consists of the following steps:

1. Categorise request as a Service Request or as an Incident and record basic details.
   
2. If request is a Service Request, provide information or fulfillment, close request, and omit the remaining steps of the workflow.
   
3. If request is an Incident, then associate CIs and analyse Root Cause.
4. Assign Incident to a technician to resolve.
5. If the technician can handle the matter, then he/she resolves the Incident, provides solution to customer and closes the Incident.
   
6. If the technician cannot handle the matter, then he/she escalates the Incident to a manager.
   

The following diagram shows the basic Incident management workflow as encouraged by ITIL:

See also: About Incident Records, Creating New Incident Records, and Converting Incidents.