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.