By Martin Saunders, Pre-sales Manager at Devoteam UK
As ServiceNow’s release of Kingston offers a plug-in on Major Incident Management, Devoteam thought it would be appropriate to re-visit important points made by Peter Hoygaard, an Expert Director at Devoteam, in an excellent talk given some time back to itSMF UK, the professional body for IT Service Management. It was entitled ‘Incident Management – Back to Basics‘.
The whole idea of going back to basics underpins the direction itSMF has taken since 2014, in recognition of the complexity that surrounds service management in its maturity.
Incident management is for the consumers of IT the most visible of all ITIL processes, and thus may be the most important process for IT’s reputation. So despite – or perhaps due to – the rapid evolution of cloud services and the introduction of smart phones and tablets into the business, there are many reasons for getting incident management right.
Peter’s talk focused on what he terms the five classical virtues – five basic elements to remember when you are faced with an incident. We have applied ServiceNow’s new Major Incident Management to them:
Process flows – targets, consistent communication and meaningful categorisation to identify trends will assist the gradual move of tasks from level-2 support to level-1. In the heat of the moment dealing with a major incident, large volumes of emails and phones take place. If these are not tracked and recorded effectively, important suggestions and possible resolutions can be lost. ServiceNow’s Major Incident Management workbench automatically records all communications, whether by phone or email. This prevents any loss of communications and provides a “single version of the truth”;
Quality control – KPIs must be defined in line with business needs if they are to help predict future incidents and not just explain the past. ServiceNow provides a variety of KPIs as standard, as well as allowing additional KPIs to be added as required. An incident’s status against these KPIs can be displayed in real time on the incident form;
Roles & responsibilities – using a standard framework for assigning project roles will help you build your taskforce for incident management. Get this data model right and you can make wonderful dashboards. ServiceNow provides a simple and intuitive method for users to create their own real time dashboards;
Relationships / interfaces – are needed beyond Problem and Change Management, to include Service Level and Configuration Management. ServiceNow’s Major Incident Management function is fully and seamlessly integrated with Problem, Change, Configuration and Service Level management, meaning that joined up processes for tasks such as emergency change request generation can be executed in a timely and consistent manner;
Policies – should be agreed at C-level and communicated widely.
Peter added that the right mind-set is crucial, and this will only come from leadership. Processes are no substitute – they don’t own incidents. With ticket numbering mounting there is a tendency to take the easy ones first and shirk responsibility for solving the more difficult ones.
Peter summarised with a simple acronym: MALT – more action, less talk – which serves to remind all that incidents are not just cases, they are faults which prevent users working. MALT – more action, less talk!
Major Incident Management
Drawing on a real example of a major incident with international impact, Peter warned, however, that the five classical virtues wouldn’t be enough.
The dynamics of MIM call for extra resource in the form of people, a script, obligatory conference meetings, engaging devices such as a whiteboard to record status update, agreed actions, and, above all, transparent communication.
The audience at the itSMF talk was most receptive to the idea of using a whiteboard to record status, theories, symptoms and actions initiated. With documented solutions often archived and hard to find, a whiteboard has the power to focus everyone on the crisis, instil dynamism and draw the actors away from static tools in order to generate the creativity that will solve the problem.
The dynamics of MIM call for extra resource in the form of people, a script, obligatory conference meetings, engaging devices such as a whiteboard to record status update, agreed actions, and, above all, transparent communication.
For more information on Major Incident Management or related service management topics please contact Martin Saunders at martin.saunders@devoteam.com or uk.info@devoteam.com.
