Incident management user roles and permissions

Support staff

Service desk analysts are usually first-line support staff. A service desk analyst's responsibilities include:

• Providing the interface between the service owner organization and its customers
• Obtaining accurate and complete information from the user when creating the incident request, and doing so efficiently and accurately
• Resolving as many of their registered incident requests as possible within the limitations of their access rights and their time constraints
• Ensuring that the incident requests that they have registered, but are unable to resolve, are assigned to the most appropriate group for resolution
• Validating incident request resolutions with their users

Specialists are usually second-line and third-line support staff. They are considered subject matter experts. Their main responsibility is to provide an accurate analysis and a diagnosis of their assigned incident requests to restore service to the affected users. A specialist's responsibilities include:

• Resolving incident requests
• Updating incident requests with relevant information and status changes
• Escalating incident requests (for which resolutions can be implemented only through the change management process) to the owner of the affected service

IT agent

An IT agent is any Smart IT user who performs one or more of the following jobs in your organization:

• Service Desk Analyst
• First- and second-line Support Analyst
• Field Support Agent

IT agents perform the following kinds of activities with the required permissions:

• View Incident and Work Order graphs on the Dashboard
• View Service Request graphs on the Dashboard if BMC Service Request Management is installed
• Access and update the following ticket types from the Ticket Console, Global search, or the Updates feed:
  • incident
  • work order
  • service request
  • task
• Create incident tickets and work order tickets from Smart Recorder and from the Create menu
• Add tasks to an incident or work order
• Create service request records from Smart Recorder (using a service request template)
• Create broadcasts from the Create New menu
• Create assets from the Create New menu
• Access and update assets from the Asset Console, Global search, and Updates feed

Manager

Group coordinators are responsible for the quality and integrity of the incident management processes and for the work of their support group members. They coordinate the assignment of incident requests to support staff. The group coordinator's other responsibilities include:

• Monitoring incidents
• Monitoring open incidents requiring assignment
• Managing the assignment of incidents to their appropriate support groups for resolution
• Receiving notifications of incident assignments and escalations
• Facilitating the resolution of escalated incidents in accordance with the escalation policy
• Ensuring the resolution of incidents within the support group's service targets
• Ensuring the overall completeness and accuracy of closed incidents
• Reviewing reports
• Ensuring that incidents requiring root cause analysis are copied into Problem Management
• Managing support group membership
• Managing scripts, templates, and decision trees

On-Duty managers take over the responsibility from service owners when the owner is not available to perform the incident escalation procedure. In these situations, the on-duty manager decides whether an escalated incident must be resolved by implementing an emergency change, by recovering the affected service at its continuity site, or by continuing the resolution of the incident within the incident management process.

Service owners create and assign incident requests. They also decide whether an escalated incident needs to be resolved by implementing an emergency change, by recovering the affected service at its continuity site, or by continuing the resolution of the incident within the incident management process.

User

A user is usually an employee who needs assistance from the IT support staff to resolve an incident or implement a change. Anyone in your organization can be a user.

The incident user's responsibilities include:

• Requesting support when necessary and providing the required information to help resolve the incident requests. To submit requests, they complete the Request form or contact the service desk by email or telephone.
• Verifying the solution provided by the service owner organization and reopening the incident request if the solution is not acceptable

Requester Console user

Users of the Requester Console are usually employees who need assistance from the IT support staff. The user or requester is typically an employee in the organization who must have a change implemented or an incident resolved. Any member of your organization can be a requester. Non employees can also be requesters, since non registered users can submit service requests. Traditionally, after a requester made a telephone call to a central help desk, a support staff member logged the request.

BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk: Incident Management and BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management provide user self-provisioning. Using the Requester Console, requesters can submit, track, and (in some cases) resolve their own requests, which improves the overall efficiency.

BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk: Incident Management and BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management are preconfigured to work with the Requester Console. However, an organization can set an option to make the Requester Console unavailable. The Requester Console is the primary interface for requesters to define and view their requests. From the Requester Console, you can define a request that is submitted to BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management or Incident Management. You can also view requests and respond to a survey after the request has been resolved.

How Incident Management roles are mapped to permission groups

The Service Desk Analyst, Specialist, Group Coordinator, Operator, Operations Manager, and On-Duty Manager user roles are mapped to the following permission groups: