Introduction to Incident Management Thinking

Organizations all around the world experience incidents. It's inevitable. Despite this, the modern world has opened up capabilities for ITSM tools and plans to handle them effectively and quickly. Specifically, Atlassian has the ultimate playthrough to assembling a game plan for incidents, from the Incident Management values an organization should remember to when specific players should come onto the field throughout the course of an incident. However, it's a lot - that's where we at E7 come in.

We can help get your team on track and ready to handle an incident when it occurs. From when and how to notify stakeholders about it, how we capture the necessary information to help prevent it from reoccurring and more.

Want to know more? Click the video above to hear Ana and Michael give you an in-depth to our Incident Management Thinking. Or skim the transcription below.

Video Transcription

Ana (00:01):

Hey, Mike.

Michael (00:03):

Hey, Ana, how are you?

Ana (00:05):

I am fantastic. I have a question for you. Do you have a minute?

Michael (00:11):

Yes. But before we do that, I got to give a quick shout out to a buddy of mine. His name is James. And he comments how much he enjoys these videos and see me on his LinkedIn feed. So I just wanted to give a shout out to him.

Ana (00:24):

Nice. Hi James. I have a kind of different question for you today. It is sort of like the acronym of the moment, ITSM. I know it stands for IT service management. Why is it so crazy popular right now? And how does it apply to our Atlassian customers?

Michael (00:46):

Great question. Well, it's obviously not anything that's brand new. But I think what's popular right now is people trying to adapt and change how they're currently managing their requests. Not just from an IT perspective, but change requests and incident management and all sorts of activities that relate to ITSM.

Michael (01:10):

So the tools are coming along in such a rapid fashion to change how we do things. Now, folks have to learn how to catch up to the tools. And I think that that's one of the reasons why it's such a hot buzzword.

Ana (01:24):

Okay. So tools from an Atlassian perspective, which tools are we using to help on the ITSM journey?

Michael (01:33):

Great question. I'm going to focus primarily on incident management, at least for today. Because ITSM kind of encapsulates a lot of different things. But in terms of Incident Management, there's a paradigm shift in the way people need to address how they think about incidents. So, I like to say when I grew up, back when I grew up, and I had to walk uphill both ways-

Ana (01:58):

Yes, in the snow.

Michael (02:01):

In the snow. But when there was a problem or an event that was occurring, it was very natural for you to just jump in and try to fix it. And then try to figure out what happened afterward. And that has actually shifted over time where now we need to, and the tools are here to help us do this by the way, we need to kind of stop and let everyone know that we're aware of a problem before we just jump in and try to fix it. We want to try to learn as much as we can about this incident to prevent it from happening again.

Michael (02:34):

And a big part of that is, how do we capture that information? How do we communicate to our stakeholders that there is a problem or that there is an incident? And how do we try to do it in a way that it prevents everybody from knocking at our door the minute that this has happened?

Michael (02:52):

The tools that are out there with Opsgenie and Statuspage and Jira Service Management are really designed around an idea that it creates a self-service notion so that the customers can be aware accordingly. And it lets you manage the incidents. And then it also lets you track what you do with that information on the other side of it. How do you learn from that incident? How do you not let it happen again? And then how do I go back and look at my previous incidents?

Ana (03:19):

So it sounds like the focus is on communication to the end users. We know there's a problem. This is what's going on. So transparency. And then really capturing that information, getting to the root problem and publishing the information, so that it's in a more proactive fashion in the future. If anything like that happens, you kind of have that to fall back on versus just reacting every single time that something happens again and again?

Michael (03:49):

Yeah. I mean how many times have we ever thought to ourselves, I wonder if that team was doing something or I wonder if they knew that there was a problem. And sometimes it can take days or hours or maybe even weeks to figure out that something else happened. And someone else knew about it.

Ana (04:04):

Right. Or I know this is the fourth time this has happened. What did we do last time to fix it?

Michael (04:11):

Exactly. So the tools are designed around creating communication channels more easily. Documenting those activities both during the action and after the incident. And learning from it. So the tools are all designed around that.

Ana (04:26):

Nice. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I look forward to talking more on this.

Michael (04:31):

No problem. I'll talk to you later.

Ana (04:33):

Bye, Mike.

At E7 we offer Journey to JSM packages which are designed to get your team into JSM with all the guesswork removed. Our out-of-the-box packages include strategic guidance, design workshops, assessments and recommendations, implementation, and training. More than a proof of concept, you'll have our expert analysis, scorecards to measure continued success, and a fully realized service management solution!

Stop wasting valuable resources with your service management systems and start your Journey to JSM today with E7 Solutions.