Incident Resolution vs Closure

[617jeff]

Hi all,

We have a debate on our Servicedesk regarding:

a. who should CLOSE an Incident? Is it the responsiblity of the original owner of the IM, might it be the Servicedesk Manager, or someone else?

b. At what point is an IM record considered CLOSED as opposed to RESOLVED and what would be a sensible duration between the two?

ITIL Service Support does give some guidelines, but I would be grateful to hear the experience of users doing this for real.
_________________
Regards

Jeff
ITSLMP

[WendyB]

Hi Jeff,

The Incident should be closed by the owner of the Incident. If ownership stays with the Service Desk, the analyst responsible for that Incident needs to be the one who finally closes it.

They are able to close it when:
The Customer has been contacted to ensure that the Service has indeed been restored.

Right now, we're undergoing the change from closing without confirmation to putting it into resolved, then calling the Customer, then confirming it can be closed. We already know from our SDMs that the Customers can see a difference and are appreciating the additional communication.

Hope that helps.

~Wendy
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v3 ITIL Expert
v2 ITIL Service Manager Certified

[Nikhil]

Hi,

The closure of a ticket should be a responsibility of the owner of the ticket. Also a closure confirmation from the end user is the right way of doing it. There should be a comfortable period between resolution of the ticket and the closure of the ticket, e.g. between 5 - 10 days. This can be arrived by after discussing with the user community.

But, from personal experience, I have realised that ticket closure usually becomes an over head for the already busy service desk team. We have proposed and successfully implemented an auto closure rule, were in all the tickets with low priority get auto closed. For the High priority tickets we sticket to the manual process. Going with the 80-20 rule, 80% of the tickets which are low / medium priority are auto closed and only 20% is something that the service desk needs to worry about.

Hope this helps.
_________________
Regards,
Nikhil Kulkarni.
Application Analyst
cMango.. The Services Management Company

The taste of low quality lingers long after the satisfaction of low price.

[Gaulty]

have to agree with the previous posts but other tings to consider are:

The service desk own the ticket, so they should close it. (single point of contact etc)

Resolver teams (techies who fix the incident) can reslove the incident, but the desk are the only ones who can close it.

hope this has made things clear

[jpgilles]

hi,

as already mentioned on another post, if possible, you could have 2 types of closure:
* technical closure from the person/entity who did restore the service
* administrative closure from the SD when user confirms situation is back to normal.

BR
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JP Gilles

[itilimp]

In our environment we have the two stage closure of resolve > close.

Resolutions can be completed by technical support staff of 2nd or 3rd line. Our end users automatically receive an e-mail confirming the closure and stating that if the issue has not been resolved to their satisfaction that they should contact us immediately to unresolve the call.

Closures are completed by the service desk staff 24 hours after resolution. Aside from the customer agreement issue, it is also an opportunity to perform quality checks on the technical staff resolutions and follow-up where necessary.

[Ben09]

Boy, am I glad I found this forum..

We are currently having a good debate on resolution vs closure with the customer and need to clarify 1 thing:
Does Resolver Group contact user to confirm that the incident has been resolved, put the incident ticket to resolved status, and then pass incident back to Service Desk to confirm closure?

Thanks in advance!

[asrilrm]

The one who should contact the customers for confirmation is the Service Desk, in compliance with the SPOC function.
So, once the incident has been resolved, the resolver group passes back to SD. SD clarifies with the customer and upon clarification, the ticket is closed.

In some case, the Resolver Group might communicate with the customer in the testing phase (for instance, because only the customer who has authorization to access a tested application).
But the clarification should be done by SD

[617jeff]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the responses.

Your advice has been of great help and we now employ a a lovely resolve/close process.

Sorry I have not replied sooner.

Regards

Jeff
_________________
Regards

Jeff
ITSLMP