Establish and Document the Application's Incident Management and Escalation Procedures

This chapter explains how to establish and document how incidents affecting an Application are handled and escalated.

Establish Incident Management and Escalation Procedures

Building on the enterprise’s incident management process, establish for the Application:

• Severity definitions: how incidents affecting this Application are classified, consistent with its business criticality and service levels.

• Response procedures: the first steps to take for common or high-impact incident types, linked to the relevant runbooks.

• Escalation paths: to whom incidents are escalated, and when, at each severity, including technical escalation (to engineering or the vendor) and management escalation (to the Application Manager, Application Owners, and leadership).

• Communication: who must be informed during an incident, including affected business users and the owners of downstream Applications, and how they are informed.

• Major incident handling: how the Application participates in the enterprise’s major incident process.

• Post-incident review: how incidents are reviewed afterward, and how lessons learned, including documentation gaps exposed by the incident, are captured and addressed.

Document and Share the Procedures

Record the incident management and escalation procedures in the Operational section of the Application Documentation, with current contacts, and make them easy to reach during an incident. After each significant incident, update the documentation with what was learned, and record any documentation gap the incident exposed as a Knowledge Debt Item if it cannot be closed immediately.

Best Practice: Establish and Document the Application’s Incident Management and Escalation Procedures

It is a best practice to both establish and document the solution for handling incidents: define severity, response, escalation, communication, and post-incident review for the Application, record them with current contacts, and feed every lesson learned back into the documentation.

Benefits: Documented incident procedures let support teams act immediately and escalate correctly, reducing the duration and impact of every incident. Feeding lessons learned back into the documentation means each incident leaves the Application easier to support, rather than relying on the memory of those who handled it.

Connections to Related IF4IT Practices and Inventories

The Service Management Best Practices addresses incident and major incident management across the enterprise.