Itil Best Practices
ITIL Best Practices
ITIL Best Practices
This white paper aims at highlighting the best practice or approach towards implementing a Robust Incident management solution, the challenges the organization may face while doing the same.
Approach
Introduction of the Incident management process
The process, procedures, rules and regulations have to be very clearly set right. Ownership should lie with a person who is known as the Incident manager. The support team report to him on all the day to day activities.
The Incident manager should be thorough with the various services, catalog, deliverables and SLA with the users. He has to understand and provide the various reports to the Organisation which will translate the effectiveness of the whole process and their frequencies. Point should be noted that there should be a clear differentiation between an Incident and Service request.
Deployment of a Service Desk
Most organization feels that this is a financial burden. Dedicating people for this function would mean additional man power. So they make the Technicians play the role of a service desk. Though this method works, it leads to operational challenges in the future and may erode the effectiveness of the Incident management process.
Service Desk has to be a concentrated activity and should be played seriously. They should be the fulcrum and single point of contact between the Customer, Users, IT team, Vendors and other stake holders to the Incident management process. They should take initiative, step in and ensure that activities are followed up and incidents are completed within SLA norms.
Service Desk Tools
The Incident management process is best achieved when supported by a Service Desk tool. Organizations can choose tools which are ITIL compliant and supports many of ITILs Incident management process. The tool should be integrated to an Asset repository or a CMDB. Technology such as WMI and SNMP should help in auto discovery of the various devices. The tool should have ability to define SLAs and their automatic escalation rules.
Some tools provide self service portal options to the end users to log calls. In brief a tool should be capable of logging calls, classifying them, assigning them to Technicians and results in timely resolution of incidents with added value such as auto discovery, automatic escalations, alerts and notifications and a robust incident reporting.
Development of a Knowledge base (KB)
KB helps the support team to approach any incident with confidence. KB provides the ways, methods, solutions and workarounds in handling incidents. Availability of the KB enables the support team to quickly analyze and find solutions for a particular incident rather than applying trial and error methods. KB may include certain historic incidents, external forums, support links from other sites, installation manual and so on.
Development of Reports
No Process is complete without a proper reporting methodology. An organization has to plan in advance as to what are the various reports needed, their frequency and their audience. The incident management process should ensure that such reports are generated and circulated to the relevant people on time. Standard report shall include, list of pending calls, completed calls, category based calls, SLA reports, Support team performance etc.
Trend analysis and Review
Trend analysis and Review has to happen as a part of the Continuous service improvement. An Organization may involve support team, users and vendors as part of the review process. The objective of the review should focus on correcting the mistakes and improving the service quality in the future. The review process eventually leads to changes in service levels, hardware, software or any Configuration item.
Challenges
User Resistance and Top management support
The success of the incident management is driven by the Top management support and commitment. Any process involves activities flowing in a sequential manager. Incident management is no exception to this case. Often users complaint that the process is bureaucratic in terms of logging the call, providing user feedback at closure etc. It is therefore imperative for the support team to explain the benefits of such process to the user community and seek the support of the top management under such resistance.
Service Desk may be bypassed.
Some users are more comfortable reporting their problems to the members of the support team whom they are comfortable with. In such a situation there is a risk of Service desk being bypassed. This may result in an inconsistent incident management system. Users should be educated on the usage and benefits of using the service desk.
by: maximus sanders
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