Incident workaround closure

[jpomales]

Hi to all. I would like to ask a question regarding the workarounds in Incident Management. I read in ITIL's blue book that once a satisfactory solution is found in Incident Management the Incident is closed. This includes workarounds? So for example if a workaround is found for an Incident, although a Problem is created from the Incident, the Incident can be closed?

The terminology is not clear on the ITIL book, and at least I understand it so. Thanks!!

[ITILsupport]

By definition a workaround is not a correction if an underlying cause of an incident. So workaround can be indentified and incident can be resolved/closed but because we still need to figure out what caused it a problem investigation should be initiated (unknown error).

[jpomales]

Precisely my thoughts on this. I can close the incident (at least declare it closed) so I can meet my SLA's but the underlying cause is not yet known. This means that a Problem Record must be created and worked with.

[ITILsupport]

Also you can open a problem investigation before you close an incident, you don't actually have to wait until you close an incident to open a problem.

[jpomales]

And I agree. However, in order to measure the effectiveness of the service desk operator in closing incidents a good thing to do is to make them close all incidents including those that are resolved via a workaround.

[Roopak]

My understanding of creating problem record is to determine the root cause of the problem so that
(1) corrective actions may be taken to prevent the recurrence of the incident
(2) proactive (as opposed to reactive) action(s) could be taken on any similar existing infrastructure in the organisation.
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[RonP]

It is correct that an incident can be closed after actioning a workaround. however, I believe that if the workaround is found on the fly (for a technical issue), then before it is implemented the authority for for it should come from Problem management as you could be inadvertantly causing more incidents with the workaround. Any other thoughts

[ProbMan]

RonP - that's a tricky one to answer. In a technical environment where the Service Desk operators are highly technically literate I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and allow them to make that judgement. In a low volume environment with non-techies on the desk I'd say that at the very least the PM would need to be involved.

[faznjaz]

ITIL is not prescriptive about this, hence the ambiguity in the ITIL text. The idea is the the incident lifecycle is in theory complete and has moved on to a new process -- problem management. Whether or not to close the incident record depends on the needs of the organization you are working in. Where I work, for example, we have two statuses for incident, fixed and then resolved. The fixed incident is linked to the problem record (multiple incidents would be linked to the master problem ticket) once the root cause is eliminated the incident ticket is then marked status resolved. You need to evaluate the needs of the org and decide on the workflow -- ITIL is not prescriptive on these things

[ITILsupport]

Many organizations use Resolved and Closed - 2 different statuses showing a state of your incident/problem. If that's the case it would be wise to put the incident in Resolved state (after a workaround has been indentified), open a problem investigation and only when your root cause has been indentified and addressed the incident could move from Resolved to Closed. This could be done manually or ideally automatically since incidents should always be connected to problems, problems to known errors and KE to changes.

SLAs can be set for Open to Resolved measurements as opposed to Open to Closed. Some companies use Resolved state to facilitate a feedback from customer, for example when an incident is moved to Resolved state a HelpDesk team calls an incident submitter and asks if the resolution is OK for him/her and if they are satisfied with an outcome. Only then the incident moves to a Closed status (which could be locked for life, could not go back to Resolved).