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Chapter 7 ■ Service Operations
An incident typically goes through the following stages of its lifecycle, called the
statuses:
Open ➤ Work in Progress ➤ Pending (If Needed) ➤ Resolved ➤ Closure
• Open: When an incident is logged, it goes into the open status.
It generally remains in this state until the resolver group or the
service desk takes ownership toward resolving the incident.
• Work in progress: When the resolver group starts diagnosing,
investigating, and resolving the incident, the incident status gets
changed to work in progress.
• Pending: This is not a mandatory status for an incident. However,
some incidents may have to be placed in pending (or hold) status
as the resolver group may be seeking additional information from
the user or waiting for a change to be implemented to resolve the
incident. In such cases, to indicate that the incident is not being
worked on and to indicate dependencies, it is placed in pending
status.
• Resolved: When the resolution is applied to an incident, the
resolver group places the incident on resolved status. It is the
prerogative of the resolver group to ascertain that the incident is
resolved and to move the status appropriately.
• Closure: Moving the incident status to closure status generally
requires the concurrence of the user who has raised it. As
mentioned earlier, in some cases, incidents get automatically
moved from resolution to closure after a certain number of days.
Setting the right incident status is important from the transparency and reporting
standpoints. Incidents with the right statuses provide an accurate dashboard of how
many incidents in the system are in the open, work in progress, pending, resolved, and
closure stages. This helps in setting the right expectations and to take corrective actions if
necessary.
Changing the incident statuses as and when activities are performed helps the
management understand the resolution speeds and the kinks in the process. For
example, if the majority of incidents are placed on pending status, awaiting the user
to provide more information to aid in incident resolution, then perhaps there is a
shortcoming in the way information is sought during the incident logging process.
7.5.3 Request Fulfillment Process
Incident management process exists to ensure that the service outages and degradation
of services are dealt with on a timely basis and to bring the services back to normal. In the
IT world, there is more than just the outages and degradations. This is where the request
fulfillment management process comes in. It is a minor process that caters to various
demands of the users and plays an important role in the delivery of IT services.
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