Do you ever look at your incident classification and wonder if it is even serving its purpose anymore?
The common problems we come across is having such a robust classification that it becomes too tricky to find the right classification, there’s so may options it becomes too tiresome to search through them all, or they are too IT focused and not business focused. If you, your team, or your self-service customers are experiencing any of these issues, it’s time to give your Incident classification an overhaul.
Where should you start?
Start off by examining all your current classifications. You can immediately get rid of those that haven’t been used in a while. Then, look at the least used ones. Can they be combined with something else? For example, you have email and outlook as two different categories, they can be combined into one: email. Once you’ve done that, then its time to check out these tips for creating a useful classification system:
- Determine what kind of classification system you want to use: Service/Category or even more granular Service/Category/Subcategory
- Make sure you are making your classifications business driven, with classifications that make sense to the business- especially if you are using self-service. Your users know what Wi-Fi or Internet means more than they do Network. After all, the business is most of, if not all your customer base.
- Less is more. If you must scroll for days to get to the classification you are looking for, you are going to just default to the easiest one to choose. Not only does this wind up taking up way too much time with all the scrolling, but it also typically results in misclassificationIf you must use “Other” you need to make sure that you are frequently assessing the incidents classified as “Other” to understand what the actual issue was and pay attention to trends for each root cause. Over time, you may get enough to warrant creating a classification for that issue.
- Always revisit your classifications. As your organization grows and changes, you will need to be able to classify the incidents that will be coming in for the growth and changes.
The goal? Make it easy for both the analysts working and creating the tickets and for your end users who are submitting tickets via self-service. Following these tips will help you have a successful and useful classification system. If you like what you see, contact us at Dataseti and we’ll be happy to help bring clarity and success to your incident management.