Performing the incident request review

The incident request review is the first process in the problem management life cycle. 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. 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 To generate 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. See Creating-a-problem-investigation-and-known-error.

   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:

To generate an incident request overview

The first step in the incident request review process is to generate an incident request 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.

To analyze the incident request overview

After you generate an overview of unreviewed incident requests by using the search criteria outlined in the preceding list, review the individual incident requests. For 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. 

To automate incident review with BMC Helix ITSM Insights

If the organization has a license for BMC Helix ITSM Insights, the problem coordinator can create a problem investigation from the Proactive problem management dashboard, which displays recurrent incidents as clusters. For more information, see Managing-clusters.

Where to go from here

If the incident request review requires a new problem investigation, generate the problem investigation and link the incident request to it. For more information, see Creating-a-problem-investigation-and-known-error.