Effective and Efficient Incident Response – Rethinking the way YOU work!

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Silos are not uncommon, but when you silo the service desk from second and third-tier support staff, you likely have a recipe for pain. An ineffective incident response system within the organization is painful and disrupts the entire organization, especially the customers. We must shift the way we think and work to stabilize and improve the situation.

One organization felt that they had a grip on service desk and incident management, but they blamed the subject matter experts for breaches to Service Level Agreements. The blame game is always detrimental. Their process consisted of the service desk agents receiving the incident, performing the initial triage, and then forwarding it to the subject matter expert based on how they categorized the incident. Sound familiar?

Sometimes we pass tickets to and fro, get everybody and their brother involved, wait on email responses, and create chaos that frustrates every stakeholder. When this happens it is not uncommon for bouncing tickets to get dropped into the infamous black hole with no fix, no response, and no communication to the users.

This is toil on steroids and sadly not uncommon. From an end-user customer perspective, their opinion of the entire organization can be based on the lack of or bad service they receive at the service desk. Social media lights up and brand recognition is damaged all due to the ineffective incident response system. In come new ways of thinking and working.

Consider new techniques like “swarming”.

Today, when there is a major incident, “all hands on deck”, all stakeholders are immediately contacted and use collaborative tools to very quickly (with humans and Artificial Intelligence) analyze the outage and determine which experts should take this on.
NO MORE PASSING tickets!

With swarming, once the ticket is resolved a blameless post-mortem is performed. This new way of doing work shatters the silos, creates a built-in synergy across the teams and a culture of "it's okay to fail". In order to change the way, we work we must change the way we think! What are your out of the box ideas to “rethink the way YOU work”?

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