Performing the incident request review

The incident request review is the first process in the problem management lifecycle. You perform incident request reviews periodically, according to your organization's schedule.

The general steps for an incident request review are as follows:

1. Analyze incident request information to identify potential problems in the services you are responsible for. This information is most often obtained from the Incident Management application. However, incident information can also come from specialists who have resolved incident requests with a workaround and who think the incident might recur if the root cause is not removed quickly. For more information, see Generating an incident request review overview below.

2. Create a new problem investigation. Link the problem investigation to the incident requests that were caused by the problem. You can also create a problem investigation from an incident request in the Incident Management application. See Creating-a-problem-investigation for information about how to do this.

   Tip

   Creating a problem investigation from an incident request automatically creates a relationship between the incident request and the newly created problem.

3. Assign the new problem investigation to a specialist for analysis. When assigning the problem investigation, choose a specialist whose skills, availability, and access rights make them the most appropriate person to perform the analysis.
4. If you find an incident request during the incident request review for which a problem investigation has already been registered, link the incident request to the problem investigation.

The following graphic shows the incident request review process:

Generating an incident request review overview

The first step in the incident request review process is to generate an incident review overview. The overview helps you to identify problems that need to be investigated.

When generating the incident request overview, consider selecting all incident requests that have:

• Been linked to the service infrastructures, or business service records, for which you are the problem coordinator
• Their Impact field set to 2-Significant/Large or higher 
• Been resolved in the past four months
• Not yet been linked to a problem investigation and were resolved with a workaround

If a specialist notifies you of a new problem, create an overview that includes the incident requests referred to by the specialist, and any similar incident requests.

After you generate an overview of unreviewed incident requests by using the search criteria outlined in the preceding list, review the individual incident requests. When reviewing the incident requests, consider the following points when deciding whether the incident request should be linked to a problem investigation:

• Was the root cause of the incident request removed when the incident request was completed?
• Was the incident request significant? Consider an incident request significant when:
  • The service outage involved more than one person.
  • There were multiple occurrences.
  • You believe the incident might recur.
• Has the underlying problem already been identified? If it has, link the incident request to the problem.

In addition, consider whether analysis of your organization's capacity management or availability management systems indicates the potential for problems. If the incident request requires a new problem investigation, generate the problem investigation and link the incident request to it. After you create the problem investigation, assign it to a specialist. For more information, see Assigning-and-reassigning-problem-investigations.