Managing and tracking major incidents
In BMC Helix ITSM, you can manage the life cycle of an outage until restoration. You can also add the required team members, vendors, and specialists to the incident ticket so that you can identify and implement corrective measures in order to avoid recurrence of major incidents.
Watch the following video to learn how to manage and track major incidents in BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT:
Before you begin
An administrator must configure the following settings:
| Task | Reference |
|---|---|
Enable Progressive Views for BMC Helix ITSM | Enabling the Progressive Web Application screens |
| Configure functional roles for individuals | |
| Configure assignment events and rules for incident management | |
| Register an application in Microsoft Azure to launch MS Teams chat | Configuring settings for managing and tracking major incidents |
To manage and track major incidents
When Service Desk agents suspect that a reported incident might be a major incident, they mark that incident as a candidate for a major incident. They also select Major Incident Manager Support group and Person in the Teams section of the Incident screen. All of these activities are recorded and displayed in the Activity panel.
As a Major Incident Manager, you receive a notification that a service desk agent has assigned an incident to you which has been flagged as a major incident candidate. Identifying, resolving, and preventing major incidents are part of the Major Incident Management process. You analyse and identify candidate incidents, their criticality and business impact. After you complete the assessment, you perform the following steps to accept a major incident:
On the Edit Incident screen, in Major incident, click Yes.
Important
In case an agent has Major Incident Manager functional role, the agent can directly create a major incident by selecting Yes while creating the incident.
- In the Team section, select Communication Coordinator support group or Person.
- In the Major incident team section, click +Add team member(s).
- (Optional) Select Support Group.
- Select Person.
- In Role, select the role of the selected person.
The available roles are SME, Vendor, and Assignee. - (Optional) Select the required permission for the person.
If you select the required permission, the person is granted the selected permission. The default permissions are access to CIs, Related items, and Tasks.
To track major incidents
On the Edit incident screen, you can use the following fields to track the details associated to major incidents:
| Field | Value or Description |
|---|---|
| Major incident proposed date | The timestamp when the incident was proposed as a major incident |
| Major incident accepted date | The timestamp when a Major Incident Manager accepted a major incident |
| Major incident rejected date | The timestamp when a Major Incident Manager rejected a major incident |
| Duration | The time lapse between the incident report time and the current time or incident closed time |
| Support groups engaged | Shows the list of support groups that have been added as the major incident management team. |
| Vendors engaged | Yes or No |
| Management notified | Yes or No |
| Security issue | Yes or No |
| Legal issue | Yes or No |
| Compliance issue | Yes or No |
| Cause category | The list of Generic Categorization for the incident module only |
| Cause | A Free text field to capture more details about the cause of a major incident |
| Customer notified | Yes or No |
| Business impact | A Free text field to capture the business impacted due to a major incident |
To launch ChatOps for collaboration
As a Communication Coordinator or Major Incident Manager, you can launch Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) chat from the Incident screen. MS Teams chat is opened and all the associated team members are invited of the MS Teams chat.
Comments
Does 'Major Incident' and 'Comm Coord' fields in Incident Management make the 'Owner' field obsolete? Or is that the vision from a process perspective?
Hi Matthew Stromberg ,
Thanks for writing to us. These fields do not impact each other and the Owner field is not obsolete. The Owner field is still available but is not shown out of the box for Smart IT and PV screens.
Hope this helps! Sorry for the delay in response.
Best Regards,
Vinoth Kumar.P.R.
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