50 Examples of Incident Management

John Spacey, updated on June 03, 2023

Incident management is the time sensitive process of resolving operational issues. Incidents include any failure events that have business impact or risks. Incident management is concerned with implementing quick fixes to restore things and minimize impact. Addressing the underlying and fundamental root causes of incidents is handled by a separate process known as problem management.

Detection, Assessment & Reporting

The ongoing process of detecting incidents, recording them and communicating them to initiate incident management. The following are basic examples of this process:

Automated alerts and impact analysis	Monitoring
Help desk accepts incident reports from users	Customer service logs customer reported incidents
Determine if an incident has actually occurred	Initial incident analysis and triage
Determine incident type, classification, priority and impact	Create an incident ticket
Notify level 1 support	Escalate high impact incidents immediately

Incident Communication

The process of owning the incident, monitoring responses and providing timely and targeted communications to all stakeholders.

Initial notification	Stakeholder analysis
Impact analysis	Proactively notifying impacted stakeholders
Contact management processes	Monitoring incident resolution and providing updates
Tailoring updates for each stakeholder	Maintaining confidentiality where appropriate
User and customer service	Collecting feedback from users and customers
Communicate issue closure	Business apologies as appropriate
Communicate steps that will be taken to prevent future incidents	Post-incident communication to update stakeholders on problem management and continuous improvement steps that are taken

Response & Resolution

The process of investigating, containing, mitigating and resolving an incident.

Incident containment	Troubleshooting
Planning and approvals for changes	Escalating to other levels of support
Engaging individuals and teams to help	Applying fixes or mitigating incident
Workarounds	Updating status regularly
Incident resolution

Problem Management

The process of investigating the root cause of incidents to implement long term fixes that are sustainable. This can be a less urgent but far more extensive process that can span months where large changes are required.

Problem identification	Problem assessment including initial priority and categorization
Create problem ticket	Problem investigation
Root cause analysis	Develop a plan to fix the problem
Implement plan	Deployment, verification and testing
Problem closure

Continuous Improvement

The process of improving the incident response process. This often means creating standard operating procedures for troubleshooting and resolving recurring incidents.