How to develop the right incident management strategy?

Every successful business has a plan to follow and guide it. Strategic planning plays an important role in this regard, because without it the business is doomed to failure. Having long-term goals and a clear algorithm for how we will achieve them allows us to see what is important, what to focus on, what traps to avoid, and what noise to ignore.

For the digital environment, such an aspect of strategic planning as incident management and response to incidents is especially relevant.

What does incident management mean?

Surely most enterprises have experienced incidents at least once, such as system failures, problems with email, application performance, and so on. Obviously, they can have a negative impact on the activities of the company, customers, employees and other stakeholders.

The incident management process involves planning and taking action, based on a previously made plan, during an unexpected event or service interruption in order to quickly and efficiently restore what was broken or malfunctioning at the time of the incident.

A well-designed incident management strategy helps a business prepare for incidents before they happen and prevent potential incidents from becoming a reality. With a solid plan, you can effectively resolve problems when they occur and even prevent them. Any organization that has implemented best practices for incident management knows that even the most stable and secure systems are bound to fail or fail at some point, and that implementing a service like Incident Management is the best defense.

How does the incident management process work? 

How to develop a long-term incident response plan

Step 1. Write and agree on the policy

This refers to the development or updating of an organization's policy for handling incidents and responding to them. This fundamental document is the basis for any action to address incidents and provides individuals who will respond to incidents with all the necessary powers.

The policy must be approved by the senior manager and must be guided by the company's high-level priorities.

Step 2. Form a response team and describe the tasks of each participant

While the manager is responsible for the holistic incident response process, he also leads the team of engineers who perform the necessary tasks to successfully handle business incidents.

The size and structure of the team depends on the scope of the company and the number of incidents. For example, a multinational company with more than 1,000 employees may have several teams that are responsible for incident management, they may even work in different geographical areas.

A small company of up to 50 employees can use a single centralized response team.

If you do not know which option is right for your business - we will be happy to advise you! (ссылка на форму заказа)

Step 3. Create a playbook

The playbook is an important part of developing an incident response strategy. Despite the fact that each incident is somewhat different, real practice shows that most incidents occur according to standard patterns and can be resolved in a matter of hours, thanks to standardized responses and predefined algorithms.

When developing a playbook, care should be taken to write down a possible series of scenarios that deal with the most common types of incidents for your business.

Step 4: Create a communication plan

In order to respond to incidents in time, the team must have a high level of communication both between each other and between the client and the manager. In this case, you should specify how the team will work together during the active phase of the incident, as well as the types of information that can be shared with internal and external response services.

Step 5. Learn from your experience

Every incident that occurs is a learning opportunity for the company.

A long-term incident management plan should include a formal discussion of lessons learned at the conclusion of each major incident.

It is advisable to include in the discussion those team members who played a decisive role in resolving the incident. Thanks to such sessions, the incident response plan itself can be adjusted. This allows companies to reduce the likelihood of future incidents and increase their ability to deal with similar incidents.

Summarize

Incident management is necessary for all companies, regardless of their size or industry, no one is immune from them and it is important to have a team that will fully take over the incident management process and its resolution.

Having an incident management team helps your business deal with sudden disruptions quickly and confidently and recover critical business operations faster!