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What are the ITIL Incident Management Best Practices?

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Incident

When it comes to the major incident management best practices, they’re best understood when you zoom out and look at the whole picture.The digitalization of the modern world has forced companies to reevaluate their security posture and how they respond to major incidents like network outages. 

Between 1980 and 2000 the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was developed and released. The series of more than 30 volumes covered best practices for managing information systems. It was seen by many industry experts as the go-to source for responding to an incident. This explains why it’s best practices were incorporated in ISO 20000. 

In 2019 the fourth version of digital ITIL was released, providing a more flexible, agile, and configurable approach—one that’s geared for modern businesses. 

So, what are the major incident management best practices? And how can you apply them to your business? Let’s review. 

 

What is ITIL? 

Over the years the ITIL has undergone several revisions, including condensing volumes or updating guidance according to new technologies. Some of it’s lasting focuses have included:

The most recent volume has updated the framework to accommodate modern technologies, tools, and softwares. 

It’s purpose is to help further solidify the integration between your IT team and the rest of the business, while managing risks and maintaining infrastructure. According to CIO: 

The newest version of ITIL focuses on company culture and integrating IT into the overall business structure. It encourages collaboration between IT and other departments, especially as other business units increasingly rely on technology to get work done. ITIL 4 also emphasizes customer feedback, since it’s easier than ever for businesses to understand their public perception, customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. 

Aside from compliance, there are several incident management benefits you can expect from applying ITIL to your organization. They include:

 

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What Is An Incident? 

It’s important to note that incidents aren’t the same thing as a problem or a request. So, what are they?

According to the ITIL, an incident is “an unplanned interruption that causes, may cause or reduces the quality of an IT service.” Because of this, it’s vital that you categorize an issue if it causes a service outage—one that forces your organization to stray from prevailing incident management processes. 

A problem is an IT condition that’s identified by several incidents cropping up with the same symptoms. A request, on the other hand, is a formal request for something like a new piece of hardware or credentials, and which requires approval before IT is able to fulfil it.  

Common incidents include:

It’s worth noting that not all incidents are created equal. There are three distinct levels of incidents, separated by level of impact on your organization and its clients:

 

ITIL Incident Management Best Practices 

Incident management is amongst the most critical IT support processes any business can focus on. 

Its goal is to offer quick fixes that resolve an issue and restore service to full capacity. The focus isn’t about discovering the root problem, rather, taking the user incident from a reported status to a closed status. 

Because incidents can be commonplace, incident management is something that must be constantly applied and improved across all levels of your organization. But adopting the ITIL framework is easier said than done. It must be a concerted effort from upper management on down.

So, how can you use incident management to transform your work environment? ITIL 4 recommends that you apply the following best practices: 

 

Utilizing the Service Desk 

Incident management has several different functions. The most important of which involves the service or help desk. 

The service desk acts as the sole point of contact that users can report incidents to. This is why it’s so critical. Without it, there’s no easy way to prioritize incidents and ensure proper workflows. As a result, low-priority incidents may get immediately fixed while high-priority incidents go by the wayside, causing significant damage to your business in the process. 

The service desk must be structured in such a way as to optimize incident management. Ideally, this is accomplished by dividing the help desk into tiers of support:

Building Robust Workflows to Manage the Incident Lifecycle

The best way to quickly get services back in order is to implement a dynamic work process with standardized processes. This involves separating major incidents from the rest and then streamlining incident responses. 

How? By finding areas to simplify and automate the following processes:

By preparing for any and all incidents ahead of time and stipulating workflows, your entire team will know what to do and how to respond with alacrity, especially to major incidents. 

 

Identifying and Defining the Incident 

IT Issues can negatively impact your business and its relationship with your customers. 

Ideally, incidents are identified at an early stage via automatic monitoring before it can ever impact a user. But realistically, that’s not always possible. Sometimes incidents are only identified by the user who’s been impacted. When that occurs, they’ll notify the IT service desk to see if they can perform incident management. 

To prevent confusion, it’s helpful to categorize significant incidents based on key elements like urgency, severity, and impact. Best practices you can apply include:

 

Classification and Prioritization

Rigorous documentation allows you to respond to threats in a timely fashion and chart your historical record. 

Any incident that is reported to the service desk—no matter how big or small—needs to be logged as a ticket. The ticket must include crucial details, like:

After the incident has been logged, you’ll need to categorize it in order to “assign, escalate, and monitor” incident trends. Additionally, you’ll be required to assign priority (based on urgency level) to determine who will handle the issue, how it will be addressed, and when it will be fixed. 

By prioritizing incidents, the on-call team can understand the severity of the problem upon first glance. Also, you can streamline the process by setting automatic configurations to assign priority. 

 

Automation, Escalation, and Assigning Status to an Incident 

The larger your organization, the greater the likelihood your IT team will have to juggle a variety of different incidents on a daily basis. Your team needs to be able to escalate an incident to the right people as soon as possible. For this, automated escalation is critical. 

To help maintain a channel of communication and ensure that every ticket is being handled, it’s important to assign each incident with a specific status in your system. This allows the incident management team to instantly see where a specific incident is in the process, making it easier to prioritize their focus. 

There are six different incident statuses: 

  1. New – A new status alerts the service desk that it has received an incident report but has not yet assigned an expert to handle it. 
  2. Assigned – The incident has been assigned to an individual service desk expert. 
  3. In progress – The incident has been assigned but is not yet resolved. The agent is in the middle of collaborating with the user to diagnose the issue and resolve it. 
  4. On-hold – The incident needs a response or further information, weather from the user or a third party. On-hold is meant to ensure service level agreements deadlines aren’t missed while awaiting a response. 
  5. Resolved – The service desk has fixed the incident and the user’s service is restored to the service level agreement watermark. 
  6. Closed – The incident is resolved and there are no further actions required.

 

Communicating the Incident 

The key stakeholders need to know about the incident occurring throughout its entire life cycle.

If an incident does occur, particularly a major incident, it’s important that both your customers and the internal teams that interact with customers are aware of the issue and aware of the mitigation taking place. Ideally, this will be done via automated updates sent from a centrally managed hub.  

Internally, all relevant teams should be included in the notification. This ensures that they have visibility on the incident and are aware of the mitigating actions taking place. Additional details can be logged on a private status page so the relevant parties can have an even better idea of what’s happening. 

Externally—particularly for B2Cs—it’s important to have a public status page that’s regularly maintained and updated. So, if a user runs into a service issue, their first step will be to check the status page. Doing so will help keep your service desk from being inundated with redundant incident reports and reduce wasted time spent answering basic level questions. 

Training your employees 

An effective incident management plan starts with training. Preparation is the first thing you can do to make sure that all incidents are properly handled. 

ITIL has certification programs that can improve your employees ability to manage any incident. Better trained employees can help prepare your business to manage risk, instill cost-effective practices, and build a stable IT environment.   

Per CIO there are levels of certification including;

The more your team knows, the greater the likelihood that they’ll be able to deliver quality IT services that align with your overall strategy. 

  

RSI Security—Incident Management Experts

The ITIL was created as a framework organizations could instill to properly manage and respond to incidents both great and small. 

Abiding by ITIL isn’t easy, but it becomes more manageable when you utilize best practices like: 

But what if you need help with incident management? What if you lack the internal resources to properly follow ITIL? 

RSI Security is standing by. 

We’re a team of experts that can assist whenever an incident occurs. We provide incident management services that include:

If you want an immediate, custom response to all incidents—and one that comes with a personal on-site touch—RSI security is the solution. 

 

Speak with an Incident Management expert today – Schedule a Free Consultation

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