Incident Management Pilot of PIM

By Jared Harward

Incident Management has been selected by OIT Leadership Council to be a pilot for the PIM process. That may raise some questions in your mind, and I hope it does. Why Incident Management? Well for starters, it is a process that most of us are familiar with in the Office of IT. It’s also one of the more mature processes in OIT. It is a process that most of us use everyday.  

After formal approval as a project, the official project team got together, with OIT Leadership Council, for a kickoff meeting. During our kickoff, it was interesting to note how many different perspectives there are of what the Incident Management Process is. This is one of the very reasons that we need this team.  This team will be representing the various entities of the Office of IT as well as our customers.  They will be surfacing and resolving existing process issues and creating formal documentation about the Incident Management Process to help it and us to be more successful in serving our customers. They will be creating a package documenting the process so everyone can be on the same page.  How cool is that?

So, what is Incident Management anyway?  Is it the Service Desks?  Operations?  Remedy? Something else?  Let’s take a look at the way ITIL defines it. 

ITIL defines an Incident as follows:

• An unplanned interruption to an IT Service or a reduction in the Quality of an IT Service. Failure of a Configuration Item that has not yet impacted Service is also an Incident. For example Failure of one disk from a mirror set.
  

The goal of Incident Management according to ITIL is:

• The Process responsible for managing the Lifecycle of all Incidents. The primary Objective of Incident Management is to return the IT Service to Users as quickly as possible.
  

The Incident Management Process Team members are:

• Christine Oakes (Process Steward), Marty Garn, Matt Wilkinson, Mark Andersen, Nyla Miller, Deborah Tibbens, Jared Harward, Troy Gundersen, Darin Stephens, Troy Martin, Relia Smith, and Sorrel Jakins (Process Navigator).
  

Members of the Leadership Council that attended the Kick off are:

• Kelly McDonald, Brad Stone, Richard Maughan, and Ernie Nielsen
  

This is what we did at the project kickoff meeting. We played games; we had treats; we did not sing songs, but we could have. We played an awesome round of Jeopardy that used process terms introduced in previous newsletters. Can we just say, “Marty Garn rocks?” He knows his process stuff and is the undisputed Jeopardy champ! We also did a focus exercise on the value of teamwork and communication.  Kelly M reiterated OIT Leadership Council’s support and direction for this project and for PIM in general.

The next step is to determine where we are now with Incident Management.  We’ll do this by collecting existing documentation, brainstorming on the question of “where are we now?”, and most importantly, by directly interfacing with people who use this process every day.  After we do that we will set goals by asking ourselves, “where do we want to be?” Next, we will design the new and improved process, plan the roll-out, and implement the new process.

One of the most important parts of the new design will be to determine the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and how we will measure them with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  We will use these on an ongoing basis to determine if the process is doing what we wanted it to and if we are reaping the benefit that we expected from the improvements.  How cool is that?!