The service desk will be pretty normal at the start of the day. Suddenly, the server of your company becomes down and all the work like tickets booking, query solving, etc., stop. If the website is down, then the main point through which you are selling products is stopped working. The major incident on your business came when it severely impacted by IT issues. Your whole business will be very disturbed and goes down suddenly.
Impact of major incident
The major incident impact is very high. The issues that usually affect the whole organization or a major part of it are urgent ones. The result of a major incident will always in an organization’s services that going to become unavailable. This will cause the business organization to take a hit and simultaneously affects its financial standing. The major incidents and resolutions can be assessed by the well-prepared service desk. This will help in reducing the workarounds and control the impact of a major incident.
ITIL Major Incident Management Process
1. Identification
- Declare major incident: The identification of possible major incidents is the initial step. It is important to set up multiple methods for organizations for identifying threats. The technician experts can able to solve the major incidents or can detect the solution by using network monitoring tools. To flag suspected major incidents, service desk personnel has to set up the dedicated hotline for organizations.
- Informing stakeholders: After identification of the major incidents, all the key stakeholders need to communicate. 4 major groups of informed of major incidents: When the issue appears immediately inform the technical team so that they can start to decide the proper course of action for fixing the issue. The management should be informed about the major incidents as it helps with accountability. The key stakeholders’ department heads should also be informed about the major incidents so that they can receive regular updates and monitor the work properly. The services that are unavailable due to major incidents should be known to the users.
2. Containment
- Assemble a major incident team: A major incident team includes technicians, heads of service-level management, and other key stakeholders. Sometime to tackle a major incident highly skilled external personnel comes into action. The major incident team (MIT) works together for resolving the issues and bring the work back to its normal stage.
- Setting up a conference bridge: This is commonly known as a conference call. This will help in effectively troubleshooting the problems and centralized communication. It acts as a clear and fast channel for the communication between members of the MIT.
- Designated war room preparation: The designated war room helps the team for gather altogether so that they can troubleshoot the problem collectively. The efforts in collaboration increase and MIT can solve the issue faster.
- Creation of problem tickets to identify the underlying issues: The root cause of the major incident can be identifying by the problem ticket. This will help to prevent similar problems happenings in the future for the organization.
Resolution - Implementation of resolution plan for change: The fixing for the major incident is a good practice to implement as a change so that proper resolution can be documented and implemented. The risk of a botched resolution can minimize the change in the implementation of the resolution.
Maintenance
- Performing a post-implementation review: Over a period of time, you should take stock of the incident for getting the surety that it is truly resolved. The underlying issues can lead to another major incident if left unresolved.
- Producing clear documentation: The major incidents entire resolving process documentation helps the company to solve similar issues in the future. The organization can implement the resolution of the past incident which was already tried and tested for solving similar incidents in the future.
- Measuring metrics: The measuring of performance helps the service desk to gauge the effectiveness of the service desk and MIM process.