Incident Management Nuances In Agile & ITIL

Agile incident management is not yet ready to hit the market as organizations are still uncertain of using Agile methodologies to manage the happenings in the IT organizations. Most of the organizations concentrate on the common approach called IT Service Management (ITSM), COBIT and ISO standards. According to the 11th annual state of Agile report by Versionone, “60% of the Agile teams are not yet practiced on the Agile methodology, while 80% of respondents said that their organization is at or below a ‘still maturing’ level”.

What is Incident Management?

Incidents are unforeseen impediments in the IT workflow. In case the service functionality fails to give an output, it can also be referred as an incident. Incident management consists of a set of activities of process areas like:

1. Analyzing the source of distractions in the IT lifecycle
2. Applying corrective measures to resolve problems in IT services and operations
3. Implementing precautionary measures to avoid incident recurrence
4. Closing an issue after resolving an error

Incident Management is the ITSM process area that merely focuses on managing and escalating the incident to restore normal service operations at defined service levels. Incident Management does not have to do anything with problem resolution. The activities that come under Incident Management process are:

• Detecting and recording an incident
• Classifying the incident and providing initial support
• Investigation and review
• Resolution 
• Closing the incident
• Incident ownership, observing, tracing, and communication
• Carrying out incident framework management
• Evaluation of incident framework management

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How can Agile Incident Management relate to ITIL Incident Management?

If the Agile methodology is incorporated into an incident management process, it will not only automate the lifecycle progress but also reduce the escalation rate of incidents in an organization. An Agile incident management consists of steps like- Lifecycle Management, Data Collection, Association, Description, and Adaptability. On the other hand, an ITIL incident management process consists of steps like inputs, identification, logging, classification, prioritization, initial diagnosis, escalation, investigation and diagnosis, resolution, and closure. 

ITIL is known as the most-practiced framework in the world, that can be clubbed with the Agile methodology to get a modern tactic to incident management. Referring a thousand pages of documents in an urgent situation takes more time and might need a number of resources in the management process. After applying a set of Agile principles to carry out a ‘planning’ process from Agile Manifesto, Agile incident management can give the quality products.

Iterative cycles:
Instead of drawing the same plan for the complete process and clinging to the same, it can be formed in bits which are added when required. This plan can be followed till the requirement is fulfilled. Once it is done, the process is ready to move to the next iterative cycle.

Ready for the variant environment:
The incidents are unpredictable, but a plan always needs to be prepared beforehand. To be ready with flexible situational updates is an optimized way to handle an incident. According to customer's’ feedback, Agile teams will be ready to cope with the changing environment and market demands.

Collaboration:
The Planning process includes the stakeholder’s opinion and participation of the team members. The plan can be changed by frequent discussions with all the parties. Open discussions allow team members to not only focus more on the project but also work collaboratively.

Direct Communication:
Meetings are considered as a formal part of the project and reading huge documents is not a good idea. Instead, face-to-face communication clarifies the critical matters and solves the issue rapidly and more effectively.

Conclusion

Incidents can arise at any time. So, keeping your plans ready is a step towards effective incident management. Adopting changes to avoid occurrences of such incidents can be productive. All organizations can go for Agile methodology to ease their work. Unfortunately, every issue can not be solved by Agile, as it is used for software development process. So you can club Agile methodology with incident management and experience a smooth-operating workflow.