What is ITIL Incident Management?

The goal of Incident Management is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible following an incident, while minimizing impact to business operations. HelpMaster supports your Incident Management process with capabilities to record incidents, classify according to impact and urgency, assign to appropriate groups, escalate, and manage through to resolution and reporting.

 

ITIL Incident workflow example

 Benefits of good Incident Management include:

  • Ensure that you know about the causes of all your incidents (when effectively managed with problem management and root cause analysis)
  • Document the continuing cost of unresolved problems.
  • Apply any follow-up actions to specific cases once the problem is resolved or the workaround is defined.
  • Be able to account to senior management. (e.g. via incident review and problem review activities)
  • Build up a knowledge base of fixes, work-arounds and other operational information
  • Produce statistical reports to show trends, work rates, CI utilization and more
  • Streamline your team to approach service delivery in a structured and orderly approach
  • Provide a high level of feedback to your customers and clients

 ITIL® - "ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited."

Classifying IncidentsITIL

Make it easy to identify problem areas for your organization, saving valuable time and money. Classify your incidents by selecting from a hierarchical list of issues that affect your organization.  The 5 level issue hierarchy allows you to be as general, or specific as you need to be.

The 5 level hierarchy for defining incident classification allows you to adopt a category / type / item (CTI) approach, or an ITIL taxonomy that uses a more organizational approach.

This same classification hierarchy used for incidents is also used to classify knowledge base articles, thereby allowing a tight integration between incidents, problem resolution and knowledge management.

Once an incident has been classified, you can then create or adopt workflow and escalations based upon the classification you use for each incident.

 

 

Incident templates for quick creationITIL Incident Templates

 

HelpMaster has a unique template-based design that allows you to model your business into job templates (incident types), action templates (things you do), and email templates (the correspondence you send to clients and staff).  Link these templates to each other to create powerful workflow models.

Use these templates to log incidents quickly and efficiently.

Templates allow you to log the same types of jobs in the same way.  This means

  • 1. Speed
  • 2. Consistency
  • 3. Ease of use

These templates can be re-used in other areas of HelpMaster to assist with Email Response Management, Escalation and Web self-service.  Read more about the template system of HelpMaster.

 

Incident PrioritizationITIL Incident Prioritization

 

Correct prioritization of incidents and problems is a core concept of helpdesk and service delivery.  HelpMaster makes this easy.

Each incident is prioritized via the Priority drop-down box that is populated with codes that you define and describe.  Once classified, system administrators can easily create SLAs and escalation rules based on this classification for timely resolution and notification.

Incidents can automatically be prioritized by configuring rules that are based on other parameters of the incident.

For clients using the self-service web portal, system administrators can allow clients to determine their own priority, or configure it according to a job template.

 

 

Incident escalation and SLAITIL Incident escalation and SLA

The Priority Manager gives you the ability to automatically escalate jobs as they get closer to the SLA deadline, making sure that every incident is dealt with on time.  Using a simple "query by example" SLA / escalation builder, create escalation rules that deal with all aspects of your business.  Escalations can be as simple as sending a "hurry up" email to a staff member for a job approaching a breach timeline, to a more extreme action such as re-assigning the job, increasing the priority and notifying the team.

The Priority Manager allows you to create profile-based escalations rules that can cover all aspects of your service delivery objectives.

 

 

 

Incident ReportingITIL Incident Reporting

HelpMaster uses the powerful and flexible Crystal Reports software to generate reports directly from the database. Find service bottlenecks quickly and easily by running one of over 120 different reports.  New reports are added to the swap-shop all the time.

Reports can be exported to other tools like Excel for further analysis.

Quickly get statistics like

  • Who is my hardest working staff member?
  • Who is my most problematic client?
  • Which services are failing the most?
  • How many jobs did we log last month vs this month?
  • Are we getting busier
  • Are we meeting our service level agreements?

Read more about the reporting capabilities of HelpMaster

 

CommunicationITIL communication and notification

Notifying clients, customers and staff

Whenever an incident is updated HelpMaster can be configured to automatically notify your clients, staff, management or anybody else that may be involved.   When both staff and clients are informed as to the status of their job, they are less likely to call the helpdesk for an update. 

Email templates can be configured to provide specific information about the nature of the job via the use of email tags that are dynamically replaced with content from the incident when the email is sent. 

 

 

 

 

 

Convert incoming support email into incident recordsITIL email response management

Go way beyond just sending out informational email.  HelpMaster can also automatically create, or update a ticket based on an incoming email.  

Furthermore, use the HTML style email template to embed hyperlinks to your web self-service portal.  Once a client logs a job, they can immediately check the status of it via the custom web portal.

Use the Email Manager to automatically convert email to support tickets and respond to customer emails, responses, or other network events.