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Incident Management for Small Enterprise

Turn chaos into control with a practical incident response program.

  • Technical debt and disparate systems are big constraints for most small enterprise (SE) organizations. What may have worked years ago is no longer fit for purpose or the business is growing faster than the current tools in place can handle.
  • Super specialization of knowledge is also a common factor in smaller teams caused by complex architectures. While helpful, if that knowledge isn’t documented it can walk out the door with the resource and the rest of the team is left scrambling.
  • Lessons learned may be gathered for critical incidents but often are not propagated, which impacts the ability to solve recurring incidents.
  • Over time, repeated incidents can have a negative impact on the customer’s perception that the service desk is a credible and essential service to the business.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Go beyond the blind adoption of best-practice frameworks. No simple formula exists for improving incident management maturity. Identify the challenges in your incident lifecycle and draw on best-practice frameworks pragmatically to build a structured response to those challenges.
  • Track, analyze, and review results of incident response regularly. Without a comprehensive understanding of incident trends and patterns you can be susceptible to recurring incidents that increase in damage over time. Make the case for problem management, and successfully reduce the volume of unplanned work by scheduling it into regular IT activity.
  • Recurring incidents will happen; use runbooks for a consistent response each time. Save your organization response time and confusion by developing your own specific incident use cases. Incident response should follow a standard process, but each incident will have its own escalation process or call tree that identifies key participants.

Impact and Result

  • Effective and efficient management of incidents involves a formal process of identifying, classifying, categorizing, responding, resolving, and closing of each incident. The key for smaller organizations, where technology or resources is a constraint, is to make the best practices usable for your unique environment.
  • Develop a plan that aligns with your organizational needs, and adapt best practices into light, sustainable processes, with the goal to improve time to resolve, cost to serve, and ultimately, end-user satisfaction.
  • Successful implementation of incident management will elevate the maturity of the service desk to a controlled state, preparing you for becoming proactive with problem management.

Incident Management for Small Enterprise Research & Tools

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should implement incident management, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

1. Identify and log incidents

This phase will provide an overview of the incident lifecycle and an activity on how to classify the various types of incidents in your environment.

2. Prioritize and define SLAs

This phase will help you develop a categorization scheme for incident handling that ensures success and keeps it simple. It will also help you identify the most important runbooks necessary to create first.

3. Respond, recover, and close incidents

This phase will help you identify how to use a knowledgebase to resolve incidents quicker. Identify what needs to be answered during a post-incident review and identify the criteria needed to invoke problem management.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Talk to an Analyst

Our analyst calls are focused on helping our members use the research we produce, and our experts will guide you to successful project completion.

Book an Analyst Call on This Topic

You can start as early as tomorrow morning. Our analysts will explain the process during your first call.

Get Advice From a Subject Matter Expert

Each call will focus on explaining the material and helping you to plan your project, interpret and analyze the results of each project step, and set the direction for your next project step.

Unlock Sample Research

Author

Allison Kinnaird

Contributors

  • Rob England, Managing Director, Two Hills Ltd
  • George Jucan, Founder, Organizational Performance Enablers Network
  • Steven Ingram, Data Engineer, Wave HQ
  • Rick Moroz, Associate Director of Information Systems, University of Guelph
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