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Chapter 7 ■ Service Operations
I once worked as a major incident manager and was heading a major incident
management team not too long ago. The job entailed keeping the boat floating at all
times, and any delays from my end could potentially jeopardize the lives of miners across
the globe. During a major incident, there could have been two or three phones buzzing
with action, e-mails flying daggers into my inbox, and chat boxes flashing and roaring. It
is a good experience when you think about it in hindsight and a time I will cherish.
In a typical organization, you will have the service desk working on low-priority
incident resolution. I will discuss the service desk later in this chapter. To track, manage,
and chase incident-related activities, there are incident managers who keep tabs on
all occurrences. When a major incident hits the queue, none of these groups take
responsibility, but they call in the experts (major incident managers) to manage the
situation. In some cases, the service desk and incident managers might validate the
incident priority before calling the major incident line.
It is a good practice to let the whole service provider team and the customer
organization know that a major incident is in progress to make sure that everybody knows
that certain services are down and to avoid users calling the service desk to report on
the same incident. A few good practices in this regard include sending out e-mails at the
start and end of major incidents, flashing messages on office portals and on ticket logging
pages, and playing an interactive voice response (IVR) message when users call the
service desk.
7.5.2.6 Incident Management Lifecycle
An example of a generic incident management lifecycle is shown in Figure 7-4.
Remember that the objective of the incident management process is to resolve incidents
as soon as possible, and this process helps to make it happen. You can come up with
your own process to achieve the goal. The steps shown in the ITIL publication provide
guidance on how to indicate the typical incident management process.
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