An incident can be any event that creates an obstacle to business operations. It can cause trouble or affect anyone, an employee, a department, or even the whole organization.
The IT Complaint Management manages service disturbances and restores services. It aims to restore services as quickly as possible when an incident occurs.
Incident management can also be defined as a process for logging, recording, and resolving incidents.
What is incident management?
The process of managing any disruption in services, functions, or operations in an organization, is known as incident management. A mistreated incident can lead to a loss of productivity and affect the bottom line of an organization.
Objectives of incident management
Some primary objectives of incident management are:
– Re-establishing services back to normal operation as quickly as possible
– Prioritizing incidents after lining them up
– Enhancing the visibility of incidents so non are ignored
– Ensuring that the right methods are used for efficient response, analyzing reports, and finding improvement areas to enhance customer experience
– Giving a quick resolution of incidents to increase customer satisfaction
– Ensuring operations are running smoothly and providing quick resolution for any issue that may occur
When working on an application, a long time is spent on its release and production. After building the features, many cycles are spent on developing and testing. The engineering team works on preparing the environment and launching the app. Afterward, it’s the operations team’s responsibility to guarantee that the app runs smoothly. At this end, the development team leaves a lot of valuable feedback on improvements unaddressed and undiscovered. This is where an incident management process is key to improving the application and allowing a better experience for the customers.
Benefits of incident management in supporting applications
1- Faster resolution
When you have a well-defined and well-used incident management process, application support becomes a natural part of your organizational culture. Then, incidents can be resolved quickly and consistently and in a way that reflects best practices. On the contrary, irregular incident management can lead to many attempts at resolutions and constant firefighting.
2- Encourage cross-training
An incident management process encourages cross-training within the development team and between teams. It also encourages operational documentation and configuration management to always be up-to-date, while emphasizing the importance of the readability of code and commenting.
3- Build a culture of trust and transparency
As every member of the development team is in the escalation rotation as backup and primary, communication between team members and camaraderie is enhanced. Also, by encouraging transparency, time to resolution will be reduced, because the on-call developer mostly has a general sense of the application. This is much more enhanced if the teams are following a microservices paradigm and contain one service for each app.
4- Provide growth for junior staff
In the process of resolution, teams benefit from a great diversity of thought and opinion. The incident management process encourages this by exposing every team member on every level of the escalation path to the application. Resolving incidents helps junior members gain valuable knowledge on specific incident resolutions, and also exposes them to the overarching design of the application topology. While recruiting and retaining talents is very important to any organization, providing a visible path from first-tier incident response through the development and engineering teams is a valuable hiring tool.
5- Create a better overall process
With continuous integration and delivery techniques, more deployments occur faster than previous monthly or quarterly deployments. This reduces the frequency and volume of incidents. A bug for example can be fixed in a shorter time frame, which reduces the need for repetitive temporary fixes. This benefit also affects the accumulation of technical debt for the engineering and operations teams, which creates a virtuous pathway of programmatic fixes.
6- Generate quantitative feedback
Every incident tracked includes many things, the time of many individuals working on repairing, the documentation needed to note the resolution and the filling of a bug report. An assessment of pain points should also be filled out. All this can inform the application roadmap and stimulate conversations about high-value, low-effort enhancements to be implemented.
7- Develop internal tools
When the team becomes bigger, differentiation of duties will take place. It is the organization’s natural way to scale. At this phase, the tools that were previously niceties will be imperative for the growth of the organization. An incident management process helps in identifying where to start when creating these tools.
Incident management for applications is a very important component to guaranteeing customer satisfaction and building user loyalty. The faster an incident is resolved, the sooner the customer will come back to use your application. So, consider it as a way to develop your targeted customer base and make your organization grow and sustain.
