How does categorization of incidents assist the incident management practice ITIL?

a. It helps direct the incident to the correct support area

b. It determines the priority assigned to the incident

c. It ensures that incidents are resolved according to the agreed-upon time with the customer

d. It determines how the service provider is perceived

1) Which practice is responsible for moving components to live environments?

Answer : Deployment management

Notes : The purpose of the deployment management practice is to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments.

2) Which practice includes the classification and ownership of queries and requests from users?

Answer : Service desk

Notes : Service desks provide a clear path for users to report issues, queries, and requests, and have them acknowledged, classified, owned, and actioned.

3) Which practice identifies metrics that reflect the customer’s experience of a service?

Answer : Service level management

Notes : Service level management identifies metrics and measures that are a truthful reflection of the customer’s actual experience and level of satisfaction with the whole service. Engagement is needed to understand and confirm the actual ongoing needs and requirements of customers, not simply what is interpreted by the service provider or has been agreed several years before.

4) What is the primary use of a change schedule?

Answer : To plan changes and help avoid conflicts

Notes : The change schedule is used to help plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts, and assign resources.

5) Which service management dimension is focused on activities and how these are coordinated?

Answer : Value streams and processes

Notes : The value streams and processes dimension focuses on what activities the organization undertakes and how they are organized, as well as how the organization ensures that it is enabling value creation for all stakeholders efficiently and effectively.

6) How does categorization of incidents assist the incident management practice?

Answer : It helps direct the incident to the correct support area

Notes : More complex incidents will usually be escalated to a support team for resolution. Typically, the routing is based on the incident category, which should help to identify the correct team.

7) Identify the missing word(s) in the following sentence. A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating _______ that customers want to achieve.

Answer : Outcomes

Notes : A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.

8) Which is a recommendation of the continual improvement practice?

Answer : There should at least be a small team dedicated to leading continual improvement efforts.

Notes : Although everyone should contribute in some way, there should at least be a small team dedicated full-time to leading continual improvement efforts and advocating the practice across the organization.

9) Which is a potential benefit of using an IT service management tool to support the incident management practice?

Answer : It may provide automated matching of incidents to problems or known errors.

Notes : Modern IT service management tools can provide automated matching of incidents to other incidents, problems or known errors.

10) Which role submits service requests?

Answer : The user, or their authorized representative

Notes : The purpose of the service request management practice is to support the agreed quality of a service by handling all pre-defined, user-initiated service requests. A service request is defined as a request from a user or a user’s authorized representative that initiates a service action.

The incident management process can be summarized as follows:

• Step 1 : Incident logging.
• Step 2 : Incident categorization.
• Step 3 : Incident prioritization.
• Step 4 : Incident assignment.
• Step 5 : Task creation and management.
• Step 6 : SLA management and escalation.
• Step 7 : Incident resolution.
• Step 8 : Incident closure.

These processes may be simple or complex based on the type of incident; they also may include several workflows and tasks in addition to the basic process described above.

Incident logging

An incident can be logged through phone calls, emails, SMS, web forms published on the self-service portal or via live chat messages.

Incident categorization

Incidents can be categorized and sub-categorized based on the area of IT or business that the incident causes a disruption in like network, hardware etc.

Incident prioritization

The priority of an incident can be determined as a function of its impact and urgency using a priority matrix. The impact of an incident denotes the degree of damage the issue will cause to the user or business. The urgency of an incident indicates the time within which the incident should be resolved. Based on the priority, incidents can be categorized as:

• Critical
• High
• Medium
• Low

Incident routing and assignment

Once the incident is categorized and prioritized, it gets automatically routed to a technician with the relevant expertise.

Creating and managing tasks

Based on the complexity of the incident, it can broken down into sub-activities or tasks. Tasks are typically created when an incident resolution requires the contribution of multiple technicians from various departments.

SLA management and escalation

While the incident is being processed, the technician needs to ensure the SLA isn't breached. An SLA is the acceptable time within which an incident needs response (response SLA) or resolution (resolution SLA). SLAs can be assigned to incidents based on their parameters like category, requester, impact, urgency etc. In cases where an SLA is about to be breached or has already been breached, the incident can be escalated functionally or hierarcially to ensure that it is resolved at the earliest.

Incident resolution

An incident is considered resolved when the technician has come up with a temporary workaround or a permanent solution for the issue.

Incident closure

An incident can be closed once the issue is resolved and the user acknowledges the resolution and is satisfied with it.

Post-incident review

After an incident has been closed, it's good practice to document all the takeaways from that incident. This helps better prepare teams for future incidents and creates a more efficient incident management process. The post-incident review process can be broken down into various aspects, as shown below, and is particularly useful for major incidents.

Internal evaluation

Incident identification

• Who detected the incident and how?
• How soon was the incident detected after it occurred?
• Could the incident have been identified earlier?
• Could any tools or technologies have aided in the prompt or pre-emptive detection of the incident?

Information flow and communication:

• How quickly were the stakeholders informed about the incident?
• What channel was used for relaying notifications?
• Were all the relevant stakeholders promptly updated with the latest information?
• How easy was it to communicate with the end user(s) to gather information and keep them informed on the status of the ticket?

Structure

• How was the incident response team initially structured?
• Was this structure adhered to throughout the incident management life cycle? If not, why? What changes had to be made to the structure?
• Can the incident handling team be organized in a better way? If so, how?

Resource utilization

• What resources were employed to handle the incident?
• Were those resources used to their optimal capacity?
• How quickly were resources mobilized to handle the incident?
• Could resource utilization be improved in the future?

Process

• How closely was the defined incident management process followed?
• Were there any deviations in the incident management workflow and process?
• Were the incident SLAs honored? If not, which SLAs were breached? Why?
• Was there adequate monitoring of the process being followed for handling the incident?
• Could the process be improved to make it more efficient? If yes, how?

Reporting

• Were reports generated to analyze how the incident was handled?
• What parameters were included in the reports?
• Which parts of the incident life cycle were analyzed?
• Is there any room for improvement? If so, how can it be achieved?

External evaluation - End User surveys

Apart from the above factors, some end-user facing factors should also be evaluated. For this purpose, a post-closure survey is conducted to collect feedback from the end users affected by the incident. This survey should be used to gain insight in some key areas, like:

• How easy or difficult was it for the end user to report an incident?
• Was the first response from the IT team swift and prompt?
• Was the incident resolved in a timely manner?
• How satisfied is the end user with the resolution?

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