An effective incident management process focuses on coordinating staff and other resources to identify, investigate, and resolve incidents quickly. It also includes a plan for communicating incidents to the appropriate stakeholders.
Ensure that crucial technical staff who can make critical decisions (such as a playbook author) can be reached during an incident. Having designated deputies for these roles will also be helpful.
Table of Contents
Timely Reporting
Incidents that are not reported on time can have severe consequences. For example, a worker who does not convey an injury on time could face legal complications. It can also impact the company’s ability to provide its employees with medical compensation benefits.
A well-defined incident management reporting process ensures critical mishaps are quickly addressed and solved. The process involves identifying and categorizing incidents. It also includes notifying staff, customers, and authorities. It can involve defining protocols and determining who is responsible for escalation, if necessary.
The report closure step helps verify that the incident’s root cause was identified and corrective actions were completed. It can also help identify lessons learned and implement changes to prevent future incidents. It may involve implementing new training materials and procedures or updating existing ones to address safety risks better. A robust digital incident reporting system makes it easier for workers to document and submit incidents using mobile devices. It saves them valuable time, making on-time reports a snap. It, in turn, leads to on-time actions and improved workplace safety.
Documentation
No service organization is immune from unexpected events that must be addressed promptly to return operations to normal. These can range from accidental or deliberate unauthorized access to information and systems to equipment malfunctions or failures.
Getting an incident report in front of the right people quickly is essential, significantly when an event can disrupt multiple departments or impact customers. Having clear documentation that shows what happened, how it was resolved, and why it wasn’t prevented from happening in the first place will help your company recover faster and build resiliency and trust among your employees.
It’s also valuable for learning from mistakes and improving your processes. For example, many incidents can be traced back to a change pushed to production that broke a service. When the technical team has a detailed description of what went wrong, they can roll back that change and get the service up and running again. This postmortem process is the foundation of continuous improvement in your incident management processes.
Remediation
Remediation is the act of making things right. If you accidentally run over someone’s bike, you would pay to repair it. Remediation also applies to technical problems. Keeping non-technical managers informed is critical as the incident management process develops.
It is crucial to identify any issues causing an incident and take steps to resolve them before they become more significant issues. It includes ensuring staff can return to work and communicating with customers or authorities if necessary. It also includes identifying additional steps to fix the underlying problem (e.g., patching software, changing hardware, etc.).
It is essential to avoid language that singles out individuals in the postmortem and any subsequent written documentation of the incident. A blameless postmortem meeting can also help identify ways to improve processes and systems, even if no specific person was responsible for the incident. It will help build trust in teams and ensure any problems can be identified and addressed without the fear of rebuke.
Escalation
Once an incident has been logged, it’s essential to categorize and prioritize it. It is done to determine the severity and urgency of the incident, so your team can adequately respond to it.
1st-level support will try to resolve the incident using information from knowledge bases or pre-defined incident models. If they can’t find a solution for the incident, they will escalate it to another team.
A good escalation policy and supporting incident reporting software is critical for effective incident management. An escalation policy outlines the upward flow of alerts and responsibility and ensures the right teams and management are notified when an incident occurs.
Supervisors can set an escalation delay between the first and second on-call responder, giving members time to acknowledge an alert before notification is passed to the next member in the escalation timeline. It can help reduce alarms during a shift or a busy period.
Follow-Up
An effective incident management reporting process helps ensure that productivity and service quality are always upheld. The process allows employees to quickly identify issues and take the steps necessary to resolve them. It minimizes negative impact, promotes continuous improvement, and demonstrates compliance with workplace health and safety standards.
Incidents must be prioritized correctly so that labor can be focused on the most severe cases first. Requires a good understanding of the impact on users and business processes and an ability to understand what sort of troubleshooting will be needed to resolve each issue.
IT organizations are often faced with limited resources, and being proficient at prioritizing issues helps ensure that available labor is spent on resolving high-priority incidents as efficiently as possible.
It is also important to regularly communicate with stakeholders and management about incident progress to help them remain informed. It also helps avoid accidental incident compounding and prevents duplicate/siloed efforts across teams. Finally, communicating with customers is also vital as it helps to disseminate communication updates and reduce confusion.
