An incident is a single event where one of your IT services isn’t performing as it should be. ITIL defines an incident as an “unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of an IT service”.

Eye wash stationrequirements

In an ideal world, the person who gets assigned an incident can handle and resolve it by themselves. But that doesn’t always happen. Whether you’d like to escalate incidents based on seniority, experience, or function, it’s worth having a set process that everyone can adhere to, so incidents don’t get lost or bounced back and forth.

The specifics will differ from one organization to another, but a typical Incident Management process will include the following steps:

In incident management ITSM, the term “problem” is used to register recurring disruptions to your IT infrastructure. Let’s say a printer doesn’t just break down once, but every week. In that case, you should register a problem and find the underlying cause. This is called Problem Management.

Eye wash stationmeaning

If you handle your tickets according to the Incident Management process and update end users accordingly, callers know what’s happening to their tickets and when.

An incident concerns a brief disruption to one of your organization’s (IT) services. But a change or problem is bigger than that. In ITSM, a change concerns activities such as replacing someone’s workstation (a simple change). Or even replacing a whole department’s workstations (an extensive change). This is where your IT Change Management process would come into play.

Eye Wash StationSign

TOPdesk’s Incident Management software lets you keep track of tickets, automatically prioritize and assign incidents, and keep end users in the know with automatic updates.

Actively registering all incidents gives you valuable insights into your service desk’s performance and which incidents require a Problem Management process.

PortableEye Wash stationOSHA Approved

A good Incident Management process helps reduce the time that your systems and services are unavailable, meaning that your business operations can return to normal as quickly as possible.

Eye wash stationuse

Incident Management is an IT Service Management (ITSM) process that focuses on resolving issues that could potentially disrupt your organization’s core business. A key component of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), Incident Management is also sometimes known as ticketing management, call management or request management.

Over the years, we’ve come up with several best practices for managing incidents, which makes implementing this process easy. Here are 3 of the most important ones:

Because all agents are following the same process, your end users get a more consistent experience with your IT services.

As well as categorizing incidents so they go to the right people, you need to prioritize them so that the most important ones get picked up first. An incident priority matrix can help you to determine which incidents should be worked on first, based on urgency and impact.

Eye Wash StationPortable

For many organizations, especially those that rely heavily on IT infrastructure, disruptions and downtime can have a negative impact on reputation – and even revenue. So, Incident Management has major advantages for the whole organization — not just IT.

Eye Wash StationAmazon

Eye Wash StationSolution

Incident Management is a process that helps get an organization’s services back to normal as quickly as possible. Ideally, in a way that has little to no negative impact on your core business. This means that you sometimes have to solve incidents using temporary workarounds and identify the root cause of the incidents afterwards.

Think of a broken printer, or a laptop that doesn’t boot properly. According to ITIL principles, callers or service desk employees log an incident after it’s been reported. Open incidents are monitored until they’re resolved or closed.

In today’s service landscape, the success of your service delivery relies heavily on your customers’ happiness. But how do you get satisfied customers, when most IT frameworks still focus on tools and processes? Best practice service management is the answer.

Don’t get caught in the trap of reinventing the wheel every time a ticket comes in. If a new kind of incident pops up, make sure to log the solution so that your service agents don’t have to start from scratch the next time it occurs.