Incident Management escalation

[scar3face]

A company whom I will be working with very soon are looking to improve their incident escalation communication process.

Currently they have a a contractor (who is on a 6 month contract, providing Incident Manager services), however outside of normal business hours, the contractor isn't required to do anything.

As such, the out of hours incident management (for critical incidents only) is falling upon the Service Managmenet manager, however he doesn't believe it is the best option.

My question to all, how is out of business hours incident escalation handled within your environment?

What sort of strategies can I employ to address the issues?

Thanks

[UKVIKING]

Hire an out of hours contractor ?

seriously

If you cant make this kind of management decision on your own, why are you in a management role

This is not a ITIL question nor a Incident Mgmt process

this is a corporate decision for your own org

This goes to the basic set up of your entire company

if you want have out of hours support, then you will have to pay for it - whether it is a full time employee or a contractor, it does not matter

the only issue is how often is this person going to be used
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John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Diarmid]

Hi,

it is very nearly impossible to advise specifically on such a question without considerable knowledge of the circumstances. However, if you have staff committed to out of hours support, then why not train them to conduct incident management on their own? That should not be difficult since they will only have to perform a subset of full incident management and hand over the next morning. Meanwhile they should have resolved the incident if that was possible. It is mostly about giving them authority to act in defined circumstances.
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"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718