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.

Before you begin

An administrator must configure the following settings:

Task	Reference
Configure functional roles for individuals	Functional roles and extended application access
Configure assignment events and rules for incident management	Configuring assignments
Register an application in Microsoft Azure to launch MS Teams chat	Configuring-settings-to-launch-Microsoft-Teams-chat-from-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 analyze 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.
The assignee of the incident receives a notification.

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.

Watch the following video (2:54) to learn how to manage and track major incidents in BMC Helix ITSM:

Watch the YouTube video about managing and tracking major incidents.

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 chat from the Incident screen. A Microsoft Teams chat is opened and all the associated team members are invited to the chat.