Sunday, October 16, 2016

Incident Intake and Management Process


Purpose: This process will help with intake and management of incidents assigned to various IT groups. It is intended as a guide to help IT provide enhanced service to their users (business and IT)
Incident Flow:

1.    Service Desk assigns ticket to a group based on type of issue
2.    Every team triages tickets daily. There may be a lead assigned in every team to triage the tickets, or everyone in the team does may review and assign.  Triage can be done twice, morning or afternoon, or as needed.
3.    Review the incident and make sure it is assigned correctly to you/ your group.  If not, follow the “Warm transfer” process defined below.
4.    Perform initial reach-back to the incident creator (user) to understand and confirm the issue and priority. Determine if this is a break-fix or enhancement. Setup expectation with the user regarding resolution effort and time (per SLA). Let the user know how to follow-up for status update – it is recommended that business users reach out to Service Desk for updates.
5.    Once incident is assigned to you, start making notes, from acceptance till resolution. While working on the incident, it is important update the incident status details. Incident status is added to the “Incident Details” area – do not add updates to “Incident Resolution” unless you are ready to close the ticket.
6.    Any resolution must be documented on the incident in the “Incident Resolution” field - make sure it is a non-technical summary – this information goes back to user when the ticket is closed.  Before closing the ticket, confirm with the user the incident is resolved
7.     “Warm transfer” must happen when assigning an incident to other support groups. This means making sure to add details about any initial analysis performed, and the reason for transfer.
o    If follow-up action is required from any other group (Ex: DBA) to resolve the issue, add a note stating what is needed and transfer to that group. It will also be useful to add what action you have taken so far.
o    “Warm transfer” includes the person the incident is being transferred to acknowledging they are taking ownership of the incident.
o    If incident is incorrectly assigned to you/your group, add a note and transfer to the correct group. If not clear which group to assign to, send it back to Service Desk group for review and correct re-assignment.



Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Key Appsupport Tasks



Every organization has a set of tasks required to provide support. Here is a list that I have prepared, which can be used as a template.
 
  • Triage/Intake of support issues
  • Resolve Tickets
  • Small Enhancements
  • Periodic Maintenance
  • Monitoring of key jobs/tasks
  • Planned outage support
  • Unplanned outage support
  • On-call / Off-hour support
  • Handle and support Alerts
  • Change management
  • Incident management, follow-up on SLAs, reporting and trends, “warm” hand-off – incident assignment and flow
  • Codebase/Repository ownership and support
  • Support lower environments, QA, Training teams
  • Perform Root cause analysis (RCA) for repeat issues and alerts, all bugs, create support documentation
  • Provide support for promotions, market share events MSE, special events (State fairs, Consumer shows)
  • Assist with business processes – month- and year-end book close processes
  • Non-ticket support (“Walk-ups”, research and analysis), communication with IT and non-IT users.  Assisting users and answer questions
  • Support other IT groups - Service Desk, Desktop and/or hardware groups
  • Third-party system support/ Vendor support
  • Provide support for upgrades and patches; respond to environment changes (e.g. Windows upgrade?)
  • Centers of Excellence – create and assign leads, members, processes, documents
  • Continue self-development - attend training, seminars, share knowledge(feedback)
  • Status reporting
  • Onboarding – provide necessary peer support
  • Participate in design and code reviews/ Solution review board/group
  • Participate in Project stages – Functional, Technical review and support, follow PM practices
  • Support Intake – Handover to Support (HOTS)
  • Hypercare – integrate with project team (PMO process)
  • Support Offshore operations (if applicable)