Incident Management Process Workflow

The Incident Management is a process to set the tickets for a resolution that are related to incidents. The incidents are caused due to interruptions or a reduction in the quality of the service that is caused by:

• Known or existing issue
• Result of a failure
• Error in the IT object or device

The Incident Management does not attempt to identify the root cause of an incident. It is focused on resumption of normal operations within Service Level Agreements agreed upon. The Serviceaide Intelligent Service Management provides two predefined incident management process workflows:

The status of default incident management process workflows is:   

• Default Incident Management Process Flow is Published.
• Advance Incident Management Process Flow is Draft.

Default Incident Management Process Flow

The default incident management process flow defines the basic process workflow of a ticket that is related to an incident. The default process is applied when a ticket does not match the entry criteria of incident process workflows that are active.

The process of a default incident management is shown in the following diagram:  

The following steps explains how the default incident management process flow works:

1. When an incident ticket is raised, the ticket is assigned to Service Desk (L1) group. The ticket is then auto-routed to the Accept New Incident state.
2. The analyst at Accept New Incident state assigns the following priority based on the analysis: 

   • Resolve on First Call: To measuring issues that are handled by the L1 support directly; without assistance from other support groups. Analyzing this data helps improve the efficiency of the L1 team by creating more knowledge articles that they can use to triage common incidents.

   • Declare Major Incident: To help track the number of major issues detected; if necessary, a problem ticket is created based on the Major Incident to resolve the root cause of the Major Incident.

   • Assign for Investigation: To assign the ticket to a group for further analysis.  When resolved, the ticket is set to close.

3. Optionally, analyst can create link tickets for Service Request, Incident, Problem, or Change that is related to the current ticket.
4. The steps 2 and 3 are repeated until a resolution is identified.

Advance Incident Management Process Flow

The Advance Incident Management process workflow is used to manage complex incidents tickets where the resolution requires to invoke diagnostic tools such as Ping and Trace route using automation steps.

The process of an advanced incident management is shown in the following diagram:

The following steps explains how the advanced incident management process flow works:

1. When an incident ticket is raised, the ticket is assigned to Service Desk (L1) group. The ticket is then auto-routed to the Look-up and add Affected Service state.
2. The analyst populates the affected services attribute and CCTIs that is prompted by process workflow, in the ticket.
3. The analyst updates the current status of the CI in the Configuration Management Database (CMBD). The update automatically triggers an email notification to the CI owner. 
4. The analyst verifies the conditions of the ticket and performs one of the following tasks:
   • Update and assign the ticket to the other process workflows such as Major Severity Incident and Critical Severity Incident.
   • Search the KB article database for solutions.   
5. If the solution is not found, the ticket is assigned to a group or user.
6. An initial diagnosis is performed on the problem to find the root cause and solution. When a solution is found, a KB article is created and the article is updated in the KB article database. The ticket is closed.
7. If a solution is not found, the ticket is assigned to a group for further investigation.
8. The steps 5 to 7 are repeated until a solution is identified.