Incident Management in Application support

Incident management is the back bone of Application support. An application support team that cannot manage incident Management efficiently is of no use. 

Incident management is done by all Application support teams but is it done efficiently? is the main question to ask. It is been observed that often the requesters / Business users are not satisfied with the response time or the solution provided by the Application support team. This results in dis-satisfied business users indirectly affecting the Business and the respective Organization. 

In order to perform Incident management efficiently following points should be followed consistently:

1. Understanding the Application thoroughly

2. Understanding the SOW (Scope of work)

3. Analyzing the issue correctly

4. Oral and written communication

5. Knowledge Base 

6. Kaizen approach

Let us understand the above steps in depth so that Incident Management can be done efficiently with happy and satisfied Business Users resulting in growth and less obstructions:

1.Understanding the Application thoroughly: 

This is the base step and very important aspect of Incident Management. Irrespective of any support process, it is very important to know and understand the Application thoroughly for which you are providing support. This can be done by having regular training sessions on the various modules and functionalities of the application. If there are any enhancements or new functionalities being implemented make sure a thorough training is provided to the application support team. Post training sessions it is the responsibility of individual executives to explore the application so that they understand the application completely and have no doubts with respect to functionalities.

2.Understanding the SOW (Scope of work): 

This is another important aspect of Incident management in Application support which the team normally tends to forget. The Team leader or the Project Manager should make the Team aware of the Scope of Work (In-scope and out of scope). The escalation Matrix, the Incident criticality and priority table and the SLAs to be followed with respect to response time and resolution time should be thoroughly explained and understood by the team before handing support for the respective application and client. This really helps the application support team in handling, analyzing incidents efficiently. This also helps in providing responses and resolutions on time depending on the priority and criticality of the incident. 

3.Analyzing the issue correctly: 

Once the team is done with the ground work (Understanding the application and the SOW thoroughly), they are ready to handle Incidents related to that particular application. However, you should have good analytical skills to understand the issue / incident. Once, an issue is registered and assigned to an executive, he/she should carefully go through the issue if it is an email or a ticket or patiently listen to the requestor to understand the issue correctly. If you have any doubts related to it, draft an email with your doubts or ideally have a call with the Requestor to understand the issue correctly clearing all doubts. This phase of understanding the issue is very important as based on it the respective executive can understand whether it is an issue, a change request, its criticality and complexity etc. and accordingly decide the best approach to resolve it.

4.Oral and written communication:

Apart from knowing the Application and SOW, it is very important to have good written and oral communication. This helps the executive in the team to effectively communicate his /her doubts or resolution of the incident to the Business user (Requestor). In order to achieve this the executive has to keep one important thing in mind which is to make sure that the person at the receiving end has understood what the executive is trying to say (communicate). Apart from this the executive has to work on his Written and oral communication depending on the client and application he is providing support. This can be achieved by making an effort of continuously using the required language in his / her oral and written communication in official as well as personal tasks and activities (talking to friends / collogues, writing blogs, posts etc.). Also, developing an attitude of learning from mistakes will help a lot.

5.Knowledge Base:

Knowledge base is a repository of solutions for frequently raised queries and incidents. Maintaining this knowledge base helps in quickly providing solutions and resolutions to incidents and issues which were raised earlier during the course of support span. Maintaining a Knowledge base reduces dependability on the experienced team members as even a new executive can go to the knowledge base and find out the resolution provided to a similar issue raised earlier. However, to achieve this it is very important to maintain Knowledge base in an efficient way. This can be achieved by making someone in-charge of the Knowledge base. He/ she will make sure that Knowledge repository is updated on a regular basis, right information is going in it and is user friendly for any user to log-in and identify a solution.

6.Kaizen approach:

This is an approach which was invented by Japanese which means ‘Continuous Improvement’. Implementing this approach means always keep looking for improvement in the existing process (Incident management). This can be achieved by grooming the team in such a way that they will look out for gaps in the current process and ways to fill those gaps and coming up with ideas to improve the existing process. Weekly or monthly sessions should be conducted where the team can share their observations and ideas. Rewards can be given to executives for identifying gaps and suggesting practical and effective ideas which can implemented easily. 

Conclusion: 

Thus, it can be concluded that though incident management appears to be simple and streamlined process, the Business users are not completely satisfied with the response / resolutions that they get. Hence, it is important to follow above mentioned points to achieve the final goal of permanent and sustainable solution for the application making the Business users Happy. Thus, achieving Organizational growth.

About Author:
Amol Bhembre is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at: amol.b@spluspl.com