Challenges

The following challenges will exist for successful Incident Management:

• The ability to detect incidents as early as possible. This will require education of the users reporting incidents, the use of Super Users (see paragraph 6.2.4.5) and the configuration of Event Management tools.
• Convincing all staff (technical teams as well as users) that all incidents must be logged, and encouraging the use of self-help web-based capabilities (which can speed up assistance and reduce resource requirements).
• Availability of information about problems and Known Errors. This will enable Incident Management staff to learn from previous incidents and also to track the status of resolutions.
• Integration into the CMS to determine relationships between CIs and to refer to the history of CIs when performing first-line support.
• Integration into the SLM process. This will assist Incident Management correctly to assess the impact and priority of incidents and assists in defining and executing escalation procedures. SLM will also benefit from the information learned during Incident Management, for example in determining whether service level performance targets are realistic and achievable.

Critical Success Factors

The following factors will be critical for successful Incident Management:

• A good Service Desk is key to successful Incident Management
• Clearly defined targets to work to – as defined in SLAs
• Adequate customer-oriented and technically training support staff with the correct skill levels, at all stages of the process
• Integrated support tools to drive and control the process
• OLAs and UCs that are capable of influencing and shaping the correct behaviour of all support staff.

Risks

The risks to successful Incident Management are actually similar to some of the challenges and the reverse of some of the Critical Success Factors mentioned above. They include:

• Being inundated with incidents that cannot be handled within acceptable timescales due to a lack of available or properly trained resources
• Incidents being bogged down and not progressed as intended because of inadequate support tools to raise alerts and prompt progress
• Lack of adequate and/or timely information sources because of inadequate tools or lack of integration
• Mismatches in objectives or actions because of poorly aligned or non-existent OLAs and/or UCs.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 910