Incident Management

The Lifecycle of Incident Management: Purpose, Process and Resolution Plan

incident management

Simplifying and accelerating incident reporting and management to improve your response strategy through CQ Incident Management Software

incident management
incident management video

What is Incident Management?

Incident management is a set of procedures and actions taken to rectify various incidents and respond. It could include steps such as reporting and communicating incidents, capturing employees and assets involved, identifying root causes, and implementing corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs). Incident management processes are used across functions in an organization to centralize all incident data, near misses, and safety observations, and get actionable insights to prevent future incidents.

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What is the process of Incident Management?

Incident management processes are the set of actions and procedures taken to manage and solve incidents including assigning responsibilities, identifying and circulating to IT teams, and implementing tools to do that. A process-based approach for incident management ensures a timely and standardized response. By recording and logging incident management processes, organizations can enhance their current business operations and avoid future incidents.

The incident management process consists of five common steps to ensure that no incident is ignored and helps teams to address incidents effectively.

incident management process

  • Identifying Incident, Logging, and Categorization

    Incidents are detected through analyses, reports, or manually. The investigation and categorization can start after the incident has been identified. Categorization is vital in this step for prioritizing response resources and for determining how incidents should be managed.

  • Incident Notification & Escalation

    Incident notification is performed once incidents are identified or categorized. In the case of minor incidents, information can be logged or notifications can be sent without a formal alert. Escalation of an incident depends on the categorization and who is responsible for response procedures. In automated incidents management systems, escalation can happen through the system.

  • Incident Investigation and Diagnosis

    After assigning the incident tasks, employees can start examining the type, cause, and feasible solutions for an incident. After diagnosing an incident, you can define the accurate remediation steps including notifying any relevant workers, customers, or authorities about the incident and any expected disruption of services.

  • Incident Resolution and Recovery

    Incident resolution and recovery are eliminating threats or root causes of issues and rebuilding systems for full functioning. This requires several stages to ensure that incidents don’t recur and is based on incident severity and type. For instance, if a system has a malware infection, simply deleting the malicious files and continuing operations will not suffice. Initially, you should create a copy of your infected systems, separate the infected part, and completely replace systems to ensure that the infection doesn’t spread.

  • Incident Closure

    Closing an incident usually involves finalizing documentation and assessing the steps taken during the response. This assessment is an important element to detect improvement areas and take preventive measures to avoid future recurrence. A report after Incident closure is available to board members, administrative teams, or customers to take measures that can help to recover trust and create transparency regarding the operations.

Different Methods Associated with Incident Investigation and Usage of 5 Why Methodology

Checklist for Incident Management

incident management checklist

The checklist for incident management is as follows:

Incident logging

    Channels:

  • Set up email addresses for communicating issues.
  • Customize a self-service portal to resonate with your end-users.
  • Enable the service desk mobile app for users to raise tickets and agents to handle these tickets.

    User management:

    User profile can be handled automatically or manually as follows:

  • Active Directory integration.
  • Third-party identity provider integration.
  • Assigning access based on role to restrict visibility and access to confidential tickets.

Incident classification

    Form customization:

  • Personalize incident form template to capture the right information.
  • Configure dynamic fields to cater to different departments.

    Auto-assignment:

  • Automate assignment based on ticket properties and ticket classification using workflows

    Prioritizing Incidents:

  • Make multiple SLA policies when more than one group is onboarded into the service desk.
  • Determine escalation rules to tackle SLA violations so that agents working on the tickets get notified on or before time.

Incident investigation and diagnosis

    CMDB (Configuration management databases):

  • Use auto-discovery mechanisms.
  • Maintain asset relationships to make diagnosis easier.

    Knowledge base:

  • Integrate knowledge management within incident management for the right solution at the right time.
  • Include visual elements such as images, videos to enhance the adoption of knowledge.

    Notifications:

  • Personalize email templates for sending notifications for incidents including status (resolved or closed), new comments, SLA related, agent to agent interaction, assignment.
  • Automate the process of sending notifications.
  • Configure notifications through multiple channels like email, mobile push alerts, SMS etc.

Incident Resolution

  • Configure templates to send prompt replies.
  • Automate email notification once the issue is resolved..
  • If the issue has not been fixed permanently, associate a problem ticket to perform RCA (root cause analysis) and find a permanent fix.

Incident Closure

  • You can build an automation rule to automate the ticket closure process within 48 hours of resolution.
  • You can close tickets manually after getting a confirmation from end-users.
  • Employees also can close tickets by themselves through the self-service portal.

What are the Best Practices of Incident Management?

Incident management incorporates people, processes, and technology enabling systematic tracking and incident management. This integrated solution detects the problem, completes it with its own knowledge base, and ensures that the root cause of each customer’s request is quickly solved to make them happy and loyal. The best practices of safety incident management are:

incident management with easy access

Easy Access: Incident logging is more effective with an easily accessible multi-channel IT service desk that offers multiple channels such as email, web, mobile app to report an incident.

incident management with communication strategy

Efficient Communication Strategy: Communicating for resolution to the end users is important by sending relevant email notifications. So, an organization should follow an efficient strategy to trigger alerts for ticket updates, replies and status updates.

automation of incident management

Automate: Identified tasks can be automated in order to reduce manual work and improve efficiency. Automate email notifications so that agents and the end users remain informed.

incident management-motivate your team

Motivate Your Team: An organization can set clear objectives for your team and communicate KPIs that are aligned with business goals as a team plays a huge role in providing quality service and improving end user satisfaction.

incidents and safety case study

Customer Success

3 North American Companies Reduce Incidents and Strengthen Safety Culture with ComplianceQuest’s Next-Gen Safety Management Solution

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Why is Incident Management Important?

Incident management is a set of practices, processes, and solutions that enable teams to identify, investigate, and respond to incidents. It is a vital component for businesses of all sizes. Incident management processes ensure that IT teams can quickly address pain points and issues. Quick responses help decrease the overall impact of incidents, mitigate damages, and ensure that systems and services continue to operate as planned. Without incident management, you will experience reduced productivity, lose valuable data, and revenues due to downtime.

Most important advantages of implementing an incident management strategy involve:

  • Prevention of incidents
  • Better mean time to resolution (MTTR)
  • Reduction or elimination of downtime
  • Improved data fidelity
  • Enhanced customer experience
  • Overall cost reduction
incident management importance

ComplianceQuest helped us make our employees safer. By consolidating and simplifying HSE processes, our people are empowered to follow processes and procedures to ensure safety and compliance. This also frees up time for everyone to focus on higher leverage tasks.

Competency Advisor,
Clearstream

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Why choose CQ for Incident Management Software?

ComplianceQuest is a SaaS-based incident alert management system that provides instant visibility and feedback on incident status, tracks alert delivery and ticket status, and offers solid reliability, ensuring that critical incidents are detected and managed by the teams concerned.

ComplianceQuest’s incident management features include:

CAPA raised per Year
OSHA Reporting & Compliance

Companies can report and track your organization’s injuries and illnesses making your data readily available to ensure compliance with standards and regulations. It produces OSHA 300, 300A, and 301 incident forms electronically with a couple of clicks, making regulatory submission efficient.

CAPA raised per Year
Near Miss

ComplianceQuest’s Solutions makes near-miss reporting easy, so you have all the data you need to ensure that a near miss never becomes an incident.

CAPA raised per Year
Injury & Illness

ComplianceQuest’s health and safety solution empowers your organization and its employees to easily track, manage, and report on any incident from initial entry to completion. This can save time by making it simple to properly manage your injury & illness reporting.

CAPA raised per Year
Environmental Hazards & Spills

ComplianceQuest’s solution easily tracks everything related to environmental hazards and spills ensuring that you are compliant at all times. Powerful reporting allows you to accumulate all environmental data to ensure you are always meeting your environmental obligations.

CAPA raised per Year
Real-time Reporting & Dashboards

ComplianceQuest empowers you to create beautiful dashboards using real-time data that captures real-time stats on individual and group workloads based on each responders’ alert volume and escalation order.

CAPA raised per Year
Priority Alerting Across Platforms

ComplianceQuest allows the user to send messages in two different formats: High-priority and low-priority, with a persistent alert to ensure critical messages are not ignored. Notifications are sent via email, SMS, mobile push and phone calls.

Rectify crucial incidents and respond to all incidents, near misses and implement corrective actions with ComplianceQuest Incident Management Software

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Quality-centric Companies Rely on CQ QMS

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Frequently Asked Questions

  • The purpose of incident management is to rebuild normal service operations as fast as possible and mitigate the negative impact on business operations, thus making sure that the agreed levels of service quality are maintained. Incident management software is important to manage the lifecycle of all incidents including the following:

    Simplify incident lifecycles with incident management
    Implementing incident management can help your organization to simplify the entire incident lifecycle, from creation and assignment, SLA monitoring, and escalation to managing incidents with problem tickets.

    Streamline the incident tracking process with incident management
    Incident management is built to deliver flexible automation rules enabling technicians to streamline service request progression. Users can centralize, optimize, manage, and monitor the entire service request fulfillment process from ticket creation to resolution. This results in reducing the time and effort agents spend handling incidents.

    Ensure high quality of service
    With workflow support and ticketing organization, incident management is built to help teams more quickly address incidents while keeping customers in the loop. Built-in ticketing stats and reports can also help provide performance insights so that an organization can ensure that their team is providing excellent service.

  • Incident management implementation helps you to improve and optimize your processes. It results in:

    Better Communication: Incident management empowers the organization with the ability to enter details and the status of an incident via text, email, or incident mobile apps in milliseconds and the ability to communicate any information in real-time.

    Easy Accessibility: All your employees can manage incident details from multiple locations. So, whenever a user makes or updates an entry in an incident management software, it immediately appears on all screens for employees that have access to see them.

    Organize and color-code your incidents by status: In an incident management system, incidents are color-coded by status, so nothing gets ignored to eliminate any error.

    Digital Paper Trail: All of your communication, incident details and related documents are managed and can be accessed at any time in the future to protect your assets from potential liabilities.

    Flexible Customization: Customization gives your business operation flexibility in reporting incidents related to your operation so that you’re always documenting appropriate information specific to your processes.

    Alerts and Notifications: Scheduling and sending alerts to multiple employees or supervisors is easy. In case of reporting a certain incident, a message is forwarded to the contacts concerned on your team.

    Manage Procedures: Organizations can set up procedures based on incident type so that the employees know what to do when a specific incident occurs, which requires predetermined response initiatives.

    Allocate Resources: You can see the number and details of incidents assigned to each of the employees that helps to determine the performance according to their response time to an incident.

    Manage Operational Tasks: You can send automatic notifications by text, email, or incident mobile apps to your team and quickly remind them if assignments are due.

    Sending Reports to Supervisors: Reporting features enable you to pull all information from the systems. You can customize the data the way you want to, and then send it off to your supervisors.

    Enter incidents easily: By implementing an incident management software solution, you can create an incident and transmit it within milliseconds.

    Proper training for your employee: Having and using a system in which your employees are trained to use it helps maintain order and introduce real value.

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