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Here is the goal for ITIL Incident Management as quoted in the ITIL publication Service Support:
The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to
restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and
minimise the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring
that the best possible levels of service quality and availability
are maintained. 'Normal service operation' is defined here as
service operation within Service Level Agreement (SLA) limits.
Let us break this down into its fundamental components and see
what we can identify to help justify ITIL:
Restore normal service operation — ITIL defines normal
service operation as Service Level Agreements. So do you have
formal SLAs? If you do then you can determine how often you fail
to resume service within the agreed time limits as specified in
the SLA. The trick now is to identify, or estimate, how much you
could improve this figure with ITIL. This is a deliverable. Select
some recent incidents and use them as case studies. Try to
identify if any of the incidents could have been resolved quicker,
e.g. second level were slow to respond, or the Service Desk
allocated a wrong priority, or the Service Desk wrongly diagnosed
the symptoms to an Incident. Use data from your case studies to
express how ITIL would improve Incident Management. Remember to
compare actual service against your SLAs.
However if you do not have SLAs then you cannot determine your
level of success because you do not have benchmark. The result
will be that you will have constant confrontation with your
customers concerning the resolving and fixing of incidents. You
will need to determine some ‘desired’ SLA levels and measure
against them to obtain potential ITIL benefits however the fact
that you do not have an SLA is a big argument in itself. Use the
examples in the previous paragraph but measure against ‘desired’
levels of service rather than actual examples.
Quickly and efficiently as possible — again against
agreed Service Levels but the trick is to beat not just meet
Service Levels. So look for data that shows the speed with which
you are solving incidents and how ITIL will help you to beat your
current levels. For example integration with change can mean that
you can react quicker to failed changes and therefore restore
services faster.
Minimising the adverse impact on the business and operations
— this is a key deliverable because if you do not Configuration
Management you cannot readily identify the impact of failed IT
components on the business. As a result you will set targets that
are too IT orientated rather than business driven which may result
in IT working hard to solve an incident that seems important to IT
but in reality is not very important to the business community.
With staffing limits strictly limited in IT nowadays it is crucial
that the IT workforce focuses on supporting the business. So look
for when the customer has complained about delays that could have
been avoided with better staff scheduling. Also our friends the
SLAs appear here again because an SLA should state the business
impact of IT systems and services. Without these you are guessing
the business impact which is dangerous and unprofessional. If you
do not have SLAs then you should question how you can arrive at
business driven priorities and incident scheduling.
Ensuring best levels of service quality and availability are
maintained - the keyword here is ‘best’ or to use another ITIL
expression ‘fit for purpose’. We often hear about world class
service but rarely have seen a clear definition of world class.
Why? Because there is no such thing! This is why ‘fit for
purpose’, or ‘best’, is so important. It means providing the
correct level of service at a sensible cost if you can do this
then you can say that you are delivering exactly what your
business needs and can afford. This is a good definition of world
class if you really need a definition. Again this means having
Service Levels determined and regular feedback from your
customers, e.g. surveys. So regularly communicate with your
customers do determine whether you are providing the correct
levels of service. Do not confuse this with attitude questions,
e.g. are we polite, work with your customers get their views on
your ability to manage and solve their incidents use this data to
make your case.
Incident Management is a key component in both ITIL and
customer service after all it is the service that customers use to
communicate with IT on a daily basis. The better you manage
Incidents the happier your customers will be. So look carefully at
the ITIL Incident Management goal and ask are we delivering that
goal right now? If not identify the failures points and here lies
your justification. If you have a good Service Desk then this is
the process where you are likely to be closest to achieving the
ITIL goals.
Business alignment indicator — the key alignment point
here is agreeing with the customers a definition and a value for
the ‘normal service operation’ which then will be and getting it
formalized in the SLA. First you must analyze what levels of
service operation provided by Service Management and then discuss
with the customers their requirements for ‘normal service
operation’. Do not be too ambitious keep in mind the ITIL mantra
‘fit for purpose’. The other key area is in minimising the adverse
effect on business operations. This is where priorities need to be
defined with the customers so that the correct priority is
allocated to all incidents thus reducing the chance of delaying
business critical operations any more than necessary. Regularly
review priorities with your customers to ensure that the
priorities continue to meet their requirements. Ideally your
customers should be able to review the status and history of their
incidents on-line otherwise you will need to provide regular
reports to them. You should also build your priorities and ‘normal
service operation’ level into your Incident Management technology
so that both you and your customers can immediately be alerted to
any service failures caused by Incident Management. |
