PRODUCT FEATURE GUIDE
Customisation

In critical event management, the use of statuses is pivotal for tracking the lifecycle of an incident from identification through to resolution and closure.

Effective status management not only ensures clear communication among stakeholders but also facilitates efficient incident resolution and post-incident analysis. By effectively managing incident statuses, organisations can enhance their incident management processes, leading to quicker resolutions, improved communication, and higher levels of stakeholder satisfaction.

Here are some common ways statuses are used in incident management and associated best practices:

• Define Clear Statuses: Establish a clear and concise set of status labels that accurately reflect the incident lifecycle. Each status should represent a distinct phase in the incident management process, ensuring that the current state of an incident is easily understood at a glance.
• Maintain Consistency: Use statuses consistently across all incidents to ensure that everyone involved in the incident management process has a shared understanding of what each status means. This consistency is crucial for effective communication and reporting.
• Automate Status Updates: Where possible, automate the transition between statuses to reduce manual effort and minimise the risk of human error. Automated workflows can help ensure that incidents progress smoothly through each phase of resolution.
• Communicate Status Changes: Notify relevant stakeholders of status changes, especially when incidents move into resolution or are closed. Effective communication helps manage expectations and ensures transparency.
• Use Statuses for Reporting and Analytics: Leverage incident statuses for reporting and analytics to identify bottlenecks, measure response times, and improve the overall incident management process. Analysing how long incidents remain in each status can provide insights into process efficiencies and team performance.
• Review and Adapt Statuses as Needed: Regularly review the set of statuses used to ensure they remain aligned with your organisation's incident management needs. Be prepared to adapt them in response to changes in processes, tools, or organisational structure.

In essence, customised status management transforms incident management into a dynamic, adaptable, and efficient process, enhancing an organisation's ability to manage crises effectively.

Customised status management for incident management offers several key benefits:

1. Enhanced Clarity and Communication: It provides clear, real-time updates on the status of incidents, enabling better communication within teams and with stakeholders. This ensures everyone is on the same page, reducing confusion and aligning efforts towards resolution.
2. Improved Response Times: By defining custom statuses that reflect the specific stages and priorities of your incident management process, teams can quickly understand what needs attention and prioritise actions accordingly, leading to faster response times.
3. Increased Flexibility and Adaptability: Customisable status management allows organisations to adapt their incident response to reflect the unique nature of their operations, the specific risks they face, and their strategic priorities. This flexibility ensures that the incident management process remains relevant and effective under changing conditions.
4. Enhanced Analytical Insights: Tracking incidents through customised statuses provides valuable data for analysis. Organisations can identify trends, pinpoint bottlenecks, and assess the effectiveness of their response strategies. This insight is crucial for continuous improvement and risk mitigation.
5. Better Stakeholder Management: Custom statuses can be tailored to provide information relevant to different stakeholders, from technical teams needing detailed updates to executives requiring high-level overviews. This tailored communication improves stakeholder engagement and confidence in the incident management process.
6. Streamlined Processes: Customised status management can automate certain responses or notifications based on the status of an incident, streamlining processes and reducing manual workload. This allows teams to focus more on critical tasks rather than administrative duties.
7. Improved Incident Resolution Quality: By providing a structured framework for incident progression, customised status management helps ensure that all necessary steps are taken before an incident is considered resolved, improving the overall quality of incident resolution.

Yes! The platform allows you to create your own severity and priority levels and utilise dynamic forms and workflows to create specific requirements.

The choice of criticality methodology depends on the organisation's specific needs, the nature of its operations, and the types of issues or risks it faces. It's common for organisations to adapt either common methodologies or combine elements from multiple approaches to create a system that best fits their operational context and objectives. Regardless of the method, the goal remains the same: to ensure that resources are focused where they can have the most significant impact on maintaining or enhancing performance, safety, and customer satisfaction.

This classification helps organisations allocate resources efficiently, respond to problems effectively, and minimise impacts on business operations.

Here are different types of criticality methodologies that can be used to assess severity and priority:

1. Impact-Urgency Matrix

One of the most common methods, this involves creating a matrix with impact on one axis and urgency on the other. The intersection of impact and urgency determines the priority:

• High Impact & High Urgency: Critical issues requiring immediate response.
• High Impact & Low Urgency: Major issues that need to be addressed but not immediately.
• Low Impact & High Urgency: Minor issues that are urgent but have limited overall effect.
• Low Impact & Low Urgency: Trivial issues with low priority.

2. ITIL Priority Code System

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) suggests a priority coding system often used in IT service management, combining impact and urgency to determine priority levels (P1 to P4, for example), where P1 is the highest priority.

3. Risk Matrix

A risk matrix assesses issues based on the likelihood of occurrence and the severity of impact. This method is widely used in project management and operational risk assessment to prioritise risks and determine mitigation strategies.

4. MoSCoW Methodology

Used primarily in project management and software development, MoSCoW categorises tasks into:

• Must have: Critical to project success.
• Should have: Important but not critical.
• Could have: Desirable but not necessary.
• Won't have this time (but later): Lowest priority.

5. Eisenhower Matrix (Time Management Matrix)

Though more a personal productivity tool, the Eisenhower Matrix can be adapted for incident prioritisation, dividing tasks into four quadrants based on urgency and importance:

• Do First: Urgent and important.
• Schedule: Important, not urgent.
• Delegate: Urgent, not important.
• Don't Do: Neither urgent nor important.

6. Severity Levels (S1 to S4)

Many IT and customer service departments use predefined severity levels (S1 being the most severe) to classify issues based on their impact on business operations, customer experience, or system functionality.

7. Priority Levels (High, Medium, Low)

A straightforward method where issues are assigned a priority level based on a combination of factors, including impact, urgency, and resource availability.

8. Custom Criticality Frameworks

Organisations may develop custom criticality frameworks tailored to their specific operational, industry, or regulatory requirements. These frameworks can include more nuanced levels of impact and urgency, consider specific stakeholder needs.

9. Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA)

FMECA is a detailed analysis method used to identify potential failure modes, their causes and effects on system performance, and the criticality of these failures. It’s particularly useful in manufacturing and product development.

Customised criticality management for incident management not only enhances the immediate response to incidents but also contributes to a more resilient and agile organisational culture, better equipped to handle the complexities of modern operational environments.

Customised criticality management, involving the tailoring of severity and priority levels for incidents, offers several significant benefits for effective incident management:

1. Prioritised Response: Customising severity and priority levels allows incidents to be ranked based on their impact on the organisation. This ensures that resources and attention are allocated first to the most critical issues, optimising the use of limited resources and minimising potential damage.
2. Tailored Mitigation Strategies: By defining unique severity and priority categories, organisations can develop specific response strategies for different types of incidents. This customisation leads to more effective and targeted mitigation efforts, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
3. Enhanced Preparedness: Organisations can better prepare for potential incidents by understanding the range of severity and priority levels. This preparation includes training staff, allocating resources, and planning response protocols tailored to different levels of incident criticality.
4. Streamlined Communication: Customised criticality levels help streamline communication both internally and externally. Teams can quickly assess an incident's importance and communicate its status appropriately, ensuring that stakeholders are informed with the right level of urgency.
5. Improved Decision Making: With clear criteria for severity and priority, decision-makers can quickly determine the appropriate course of action for each incident. This clarity reduces hesitation and accelerates the response to critical incidents.
6. Focused Risk Management: Customising criticality allows organisations to focus their risk management efforts on areas with the greatest potential impact. This leads to a more efficient allocation of resources towards mitigating risks that could lead to the most severe incidents.
7. Adaptability to Organisational Needs: Each organisation faces unique challenges and risks. Customised criticality management allows for adjustments based on specific operational needs, industry standards, and regulatory requirements, ensuring that the approach to incident management is both relevant and effective.
8. Continuous Improvement: By analysing incidents based on customised severity and priority levels, organisations can identify trends, assess the effectiveness of their response strategies, and make data-driven improvements to their incident management processes.