SFIA Incident management USUP

This page provides deep dive guidance and additional material to help individuals and organisations use and apply this SFIA skill effectively. It supplements the SFIA reference material.

SFIA v6 definition of Incident management

The processing and coordination of appropriate and timely responses to incident reports, including channelling requests for help to appropriate functions for resolution, monitoring resolution activity, and keeping clients appraised of progress towards service restoration.

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• This highest level for this skill is level 5. This reflects that the higher level skills related to setting policies and standards are found in other SFIA skills e.g. IT management.
• The lowest level of this skills is administrative and procedural.
• The focus of this skill at the higher levels is “process management and execution” ; it reflects coordination / facilitation of the Incident Management process (see ITIL).
• In general; roles which contribute or provide input to resolving incidents don't need to have the Incident Management skill
• Incidents range in size from minor to major incident / crisis management. This means the scale and scope of the incident response can range in size considerably; from a very limited impact all the way to an organisation wide.

If you are looking for skills relating to:

• the process of resolving problems (proactively or re-actively); try SFIA Problem management PBMG
• the provision of service continuity planning and support; try SFIA Continuity management
• the operation of service desk functions, including support for users and customers reporting issues; try SFIA Customer service support CSMG
• the ongoing management of operational facilities to provide the agreed levels of service; try SFIA Service level management SLMO
• making arrangements for disaster recovery together with supporting processes ; try SFIA Availability management
• overall development, delivery, support continuous improvement of IT services ; try SFIA IT management

• ITIL
• ITSMF International: Independent and internationally recognised forum for IT Service Management professionals worldwide.
• IT4IT™ Reference Architecture: see the IT4IT Reference Architecture Detect to Correct (D2C) Value Stream
• CMMI® for Services, CMMI-SVC, V1.3 Improving processes for providing better services
• ISO/IEC 20000-1

• Service Management
• Service Operations

By focussing on work outputs/work products we can move the focus from activity/knowledge to performance and provide a direct link to business results. See 6 boxes model.

Leading

• stakeholder relationships and relationship management plan
• management commitment to incident management processes, tools, continuous improvement
• sufficient resources and capability to enact incident management
• organisational model for provision of incident management

Managing

• operational plan for meeting incident management commitments
• flexible, responsive process
• log of issues, dependencies, conflicts and actions needed to improve service quality and stability
• engaged incident resoluton groups who understand and execute their contributions
• client relationships
• 3rd party supplier relationships
• capable team of incident analysts
• tools and performance support for incident management
• incident management resource and deployment plans
• incident management performance reports (e.g. process metrics, progress, quality of deliverables, compliance to standards)
• knowledge management
• reviews to ensure quality deliverables

Doing

• resolution of incidents - including major incidents
• engaged stakeholders and suppliers
• education, guidance support to aid adherence and adoption of incident management processes
• action plan to recover systems and restore service
• analysis and diagnosis of incidents
• documentation of temporary solutions
• classification of incidents with priority, impact and category
• reports on the progress of incident resolution
• known error database