So most people, as service consumers, have experienced a service desk, they've contacted the service desk. The other practice that they have probably come in contact with is incident management.

Now ITIL doesn't talk about faults, but we all recognize that sometimes some things go wrong and in the ITIL world that's an incident. An incident management is about managing the incident.

The definition of an incident is “the unplanned interruption to a service or a reduction in the quality of the service”. So something isn't working as it should be, reduction in the quality or an unplanned interruption. It stopped working completely.

The role of the incident management practice is to try and restore that level of service as soon as possible. Incident management is not about getting to the root cause of why things broke or ran slowly, it's just simply about getting the user back up and running as quickly as possible.

So an example of that would, think about first aid. If somebody hurts themselves. So I hope it doesn't happen to you, but if one of your children hurts themselves and cuts their knee, for example, and there is blood pouring down their knee, they're going to cry. Clearly they're going to cry.

As a parent or as a guardian, what do you do? Your first response is not to say, “Oh my goodness, what caused that? Let's try and find the root cause and let's stop anybody else hurting themself”.

Your first response is to say, “OK, let's sort you out, let's stop the bleeding, let's calm down and tell me what happened”. And in in a nutshell, that is what incident management is about. It's about first aid, putting the sticking plaster on, getting the users back up and running as quickly as possible.

And then problem management, as a problem management practice, we'll look at why that incident occurred in the first place. So incident management is just about patching you up and getting you back to work.

So that's a standard incident. But it may be that the impact of that incident on the business is far greater than first thought or that there are many people impacted by that incident. So the service desk or whoever is leading the incident management practice might declare this to be a major incident.

So we may have a major incident procedure or even a major incident process which involves bringing in senior management or additional layers of escalation for additional resources, for additional time, whatever.

So we have a regular incident that is dealt with generally at the service desk, or if it becomes a major incident, it might mean that we have to bring in additional resources.

That's frequently today referred to as swarming, bringing together a collection of people to all look at the same issue, a bit like a swarm of bees all looking for a new hive.

The ITIL practices in detail: Incident and problem management

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