Incident Management

Nothing focuses the mind quite like the possibility that the money you have earned through the diligent provision of valuable IT services could be ripped away from your clutches due to poor performance or non-compliance with previously agreed penalty clauses. Punitive penalties are common place within the IT outsourcing market place and can significantly affect the profitability, or indeed very survival, of the service provider.

Are incidents or performance levels that incur penalties clearly defined?
• Is the way non-performance is measured clearly understood?
• Are the penalties time boxed or can they accumulate indefinitely?
• Are service level periods defined? Are these based upon fixed periods or a rolling window of performance?
• Are penalties limited by an upper threshold?
• Are payment terms for penalties defined?
• Are there any arbitration processes described in case of disputes over penalties?

Does your company ready to implement effective Incident Management process? Here is common problem that your company will face:

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.

Any other experience? This list is taken from Rob Addy book’s Effective IT Service Management. But I’m sure that the fact is usually worst than this.