Before fully directing all of the operation’s resources, people and activities, it is best practice to validate the major incident. However, our advice would be to engage the primary Technical Resolver Group before validation in order to avoid losing essential resolution time. There are several, often quick ways to validate that a major incident has occurred: Contact the affected end users The Technical Resolving Group can confirm that the technology or service is affected Validation avoids wasting time, effort and resources. Here are some examples of instances that may have initially been flagged as a major incident, but following validation, could be down graded: The affected infrastructure and related business critical services may have had a momentary alert, but...
A long-standing debate in the industry, should Major Incident Managers be technical? This question seems to be firmly dividing with very few people being undecided, they either strongly believe that yes, they should be, or no they should not. Well, we believe the answer is no, they should not be technical, but really it requires a little more explanation than that, and it depends… What size organisation are we talking about? It depends on the size of your organisation and Operations. In an ideal world, and one that most large Managed Service Providers and enterprise In-House Operations find themselves in, there would be dedicated Major Incident Managers, who do nothing but focus on Major Incident Management. After all, the...
It is imperative that processes are in place that ensure a major incident is identified. Typical alert and identification scenarios include:
The Service Desk notices a large volume of similar incidents that seem connected to a single issue
End users contact the Service Desk or use a self-service portal to notify the Service Desk of a critical service outage
Event monitoring alerts business-critical services that there is a failure or potential failure
Technical Resolving Groups identify a major incident or potential major incident during routine maintenance work.
A career in Major Incident Management is exciting and can be high profile. You engage with nearly all of the Operational staff at different stages, with your communications reaching the entire End User community, including C-suite Executives. Whilst the role can be thrilling, it is also easy to let a few bad habits seriously impact on your credibility and career. Here are 3 common mistakes to keep a check on and avoid: 1 . Don’t think win/lose, think win/win It can be difficult to strike the right balance; your primary objective is to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible, and often that means being assertive. However being too dominant with Technical Staff might get you the result...
We watched a video recently with Charlie Munger (Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, controlled by Warren Buffet). Charlie Munger is an extremely successful and respected man. In this video Charlie talks about his 10 rules of success, it struck us that the Major Incident Management community would benefit from his wisdom. A shortened version of his 10 rules are: Always keep learning Deserve what you want (i.e. work hard to earn trust and respect) Know the edge of your own competency Be a survivor Practice the right approach Understand what you are doing Invest in trust Know all of the big ideas Swim as competently as you can (accept that you will fail sometimes, we all do) Don’t submerge into self-pity...
