Handling Critical and High priority incidents

Last week, we discussed urgency, impact and priority, as these things pertain to incidents in ITIL. As I mentioned, critical and high priority incidents are mercifully rare. When they do, inevitably, occur, it is imperative that we respond appropriately, and immediately.

Thinking back to the priority table we created last week, we learned that response time is always more critical than resolution time. Having spent the time to define important processes, and teaching ourselves how to prioritize incidents, most of the work is already done. With critical and high priority incidents, there are a couple of things we need to do, beyond diagnozing and fixing the issue.

Because business critical processes are so important, the Incident Manager should be informed immediately, and be kept abreast of all major developments. In addition, the front-line support team should be informed of the incident, so that they can tie subsequent reports to the original ticket.

While a front-line tech can do a lot of legwork, in many cases, the systems involved are so complex that they are simply not able to fix the issue. It is then their responsibility to delegate the issue to someone who knows the system more closely, and coordinate with them and the Incident Manager to ensure fastest possible resolution of the issue.