Policy Series - 1: Incident Management Policy

INTRODUCTION:

This policy document is aligned to ISO/IEC 20000 and ITIL V3 best practices.

As per this policy incident is defined as:

• Unplanned interruption of any IT Service
• Degradation in quality of any IT Service
• Failure of any CI (configuration item) that has not yet affected a service

SCOPE:

This policy is applicable to the entire incident management life cycle as described in Incident Management process document. It includes all the IT services and underlying infrastructure & applications used to deliver the business services. Thus, the scope encompasses entire ICT infrastructure which includes servers (physical & virtual), applications, software, network components, user end devices, etc. 

This policy is applicable to all permanent, temporary and contract staff.

POLICY:

• A standard Incident Management process will be defined and adopted by the entire organization
• Major Incident Management sub-process will be defined and followed to address major incidents
• Staff should be trained to ensure that a common understand on incident and major incident management prevails across the entire organization
• Roles and responsibilities shall be defined and communicated for effective incident and Major Incident Management
• Service desk should be the Single Point of Contact for the users
• All incidents should be recorded in the incident logging tool including:
• Call to service desk
• e-Mails to service desk
• Service desk should ensure the correct logging of incident tickets (service request should not be logged as an incident)
• Service desk should correctly categorize all incidents
• Priority should be assigned to every incident based on the impact and urgency (Impact - urgency matrix and critical services list should be referred to)
• All incidents should be linked to a CI
• Tickets not auto-assigned by the tool has to be routed by the Service Desk to relevant support group
• In case the ticket is assigned to a support group and not assigned to the individual support engineer, the accountability to assign the ticket not only lies with the team/shift lead of that support group but also on the support engineers
• Progress of all incidents should be monitored by service desk and incident record updated on the progress till resolution and closure
• Service desk should immediately inform Major Incident Manager in case of major incidents in order to ensure that Major Incident Management sub-process is triggered
• User should be updated regarding the progress of the incident as per the communication matrix agreed upon till closure of the incident
• Roles and Responsibilities should be clearly defined for escalations
• Service desk should ensure escalation of incidents as per the escalation matrix
• All SLAs for incident management including the ones related to service desk (average wait time, average hold time, etc.) as agreed with the customer should be adhered to
• Customer should be informed of any breach or potential breach of service levels 
• Known errors should be made available for effective Incident Management
• Corrective actions should be controlled through the Change Management process
• Incident priority should be upgraded or downgraded only post approval for the concerned approval authority as documented in the process document
• Incident Management performance shall be reported and reviewed periodically
• Continual Service Improvement initiatives should be taken up by Incident Management 

ACCOUNTABILITY & RESPONSIBILITY TOWARDS POLICY ADHERENCE

• Team Leads and delivery heads are responsible to ensure that their staffs are adequately trained to support this policy
• Incident Managers, Major Incident Managers, Service Desk Leads and Quality leads are responsible to drive adherence to the policy and process
• Accountability to adherence to policy and process lies with individual staff

BREACH:

Non-adherence to this policy will lead to disciplinary actions as per the organization's disciplinary policy and may even lead to termination of employment.

EXEMPTION:

N/A.

REFERENCES

Following documents should be referred to along with this policy document:

• Incident Management process document
• Problem Management policy
• Change Management policy
• Service Level Management policy
• Availability Management policy