Common incident management issues

The following post on the Security Procedure blog lists some common incident management issues. Incident management is a fundamental ITIL process.

Common incident management issues include:

1. Extended resolution times
2. Inconsistent service delivery/approach to resolution
3. Incomplete fixes/Incidents needing to be re-opened
4. Too many touch points required to resolve an issue
5. Inefficient trouble shooting procedures
6. Poor visibility of impact of incidents upon the business
7. Routing errors/Multiple re-assignments
8. Inappropriate prioritization of incidents
9. Inefficient workload management
10. Poor communication of outages and their impact
11. Lack of a closed loop process i.e. no formal closure
12. Continuously re-inventing the wheel
13. Ineffective use of knowledge repositories
14. Poor categorisation/classification of incidents
15. Buck passing between functional/implementation groups
16. Lack of visibility of incident status
17. Temporary workarounds being left in place as permanent fixes
18. Unnecessarily high levels of follow up/chase calls
19. Availability of Help Desk staff
20. Skill levels of Help Desk staff
21. Single incident management process irrespective of nature and scope of incident e.g. Critical service impacting incidents treated in the same way as a user that has forgotten their password.

This list is from Rob Addy book’s Effective IT Service Management. The Major Incident Process described in this blog tries to address many of these issues, and is linked to problem management for quality.