A major part of the incident apart from diagnosing and resolving incident revolves around the communication activities between various parties. For starters, when an incident is notified, the service desk needs to notify the support teams. If the organization has scope for an incident manager to play a part, then the incident manager can take over major incident notification activity.
After the support teams are engaged, service desk must engage in informing other important stakeholders like the senior management, customer contacts, vendors and other relevant parties.
The success of incident management is derived from the effectiveness of communication. In ensuring communication does not fail, the service desk plays a pivotal. Of course, you will have communication channels between the support teams, between the service manager and customer contacts and others that don’t necessarily involve a service desk. But, the seed for communication to erupt when an incident occurs is sown by the service desk.
Today, I am sharing an MS Word template for communicating major changes to all stakeholders. The template needs to be populated and sent across to agreed upon distribution list when the incident starts and ends. Also, I would strongly recommend sending this out every hour from the time the incident starts until it is resolved. Stakeholders need to know how the incident is progressing. If all the stakeholders start pestering one contact or another in the organization for updates, the support teams are bound to sideline from their primary job of resolving the incident and focusing on updating the stakeholders.
While I say that the support teams must concentrate on resolving incidents and not updating stakeholders, I am not hinting that they should stop communicating with the outside world. Their primary responsibility includes updating the ticketing engine with all the updates on a regular basis – which is preferably around 20-25 minutes.
The template is self-explanatory so I will not get into the nitty-gritty of it. If you have any questions around the template or the fields, comment below and I will help you out.
