Incident Management

Recently, as part of a professional networking organization, I was tasked with scheduling a session for like-minded colleagues. The challenge, I soon found, was that while most people were good with Thursday, one service desk manager was adamant that he couldn’t make it. When I asked why, he said they are almost always overloaded with incidents on Thursday, so the likelihood of making it was next to nil. Intrigued by his ability to see into …

Fact: Your IT operations are monitoring your infrastructure in some capacity. Whether it is network traffic, database activity, application health, or a combination of these, your goal is to ensure stability. How well is this working out? Depending on your IT organizational structure, each “silo” may answer that everything is working rather well, so you might want to reframe the question to determine what value your monitoring is adding. If you were to look at …

Always plan for the unexpected, because you never know when something detrimental may occur and derail everything you have worked so hard for. In a post at his blog, Joe the IT Guy discusses business continuity (BC) or disaster recovery (DR) plans and their importance. It is unfortunate, but most often the BS/DR plans are not kept in good enough shape to prove effective in a true disaster. They are left not updated, lost, or …

At a recent service management event I met up with a friend who is a problem manager, and as practitioners do, they tend to vent about one issue that they are facing in their organization. We started talking about a problem record that they had open and how it seemed it was never going to be closed off. Digging a little deeper, I asked why it was still open. “You know…the root cause of this …

A major incident, defined by Prithiv RajKumar as an event requiring deviation from standard IT protocol, does not need to turn into a dramatic hand-waving festival. In an article for IT Pro Portal, RajKumar offers eight tips to make major incident resolution feel like a walk through the park. Well, okay, it won’t be quite that easy. 8 No-Drama Decisions Define the incident. Create exclusive workflows. Ready your resources. Supply stringent SLAs and hierarchical escalations. …

While sitting on a bus on the way to work, I saw a billboard that said something to the effect of, “We DO Sales.” I always love when people say that they ‘do’ something. A few months back I was discussing IT Service Management with a colleague who is currently at another company. She mentioned some improvement initiatives they were working on and said, “… and well, you know, we already do Incident.” There it …

Revenue funneled to IT service is supposed to be transformed into value through innovation insights. But oftentimes, as Joe the IT Guy laments, it just gets sliced up (pie-style) into three big chunks – equipment cost, employee pay, and vendor contracts: What do the customers of IT get in return for this investment? At best they get a reduction in the amount of business disruption that they suffer as a result of service failures. It’s …

What happens when you fall off the bike? Well, if you were anti-social like me, you got off the bike and quit learning since you had no place to be anyway. But apparently most normal human beings keep trying, so you will relate to Ryan Ogilvie’s post better than I did. He says when it comes to incident management, most organizations will experience issues, learn from them, and do a better job the next time. …