Effective Incident Classification

IT departments dealing with high volume of incidents will encounter a very specific challenge. It might be difficult to perform efficient incident trending without optimal classification scheme.

Basic

The most basic incident classification is related to:

  • Service
  • Impact
Every incident should be related to one of the services offered and have an impact assigned. This is relatively simple and does not require substantial effort of your Service Desk. It is also essential for effective operations, because incident priority is determined based on those two variables.

More Advanced

However, if particular services have many incidents, you might want to consider introducing additional classification. That is particularly useful in Problem Management. You could classify incidents based on
  • Resolution status
    • Permanent solution
    • Workaround
    • Unable to solve
    • Gone on its own
  • CI Attribute
    • Application
    • Server
    • Etc.
As you could imagine, the classification can grow pretty complex over time. Particularly the CI attribute tree could become a nightmare for the Service Desk. If you go all out and demand classification on multiple levels, efficiency of the process will be diminished. Also, quality of the data will be questionable.

Keep it simple, classify only by the attributes which serve a clear purpose in other processes, like Problem Management or Service Level Management. It is good practice to collect only data which are actually used. Especially if the data collection process involves manual work of the Service Desk.

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