The term "incident management" refers to the structured recording, assessment, handling, and tracking of unexpected events, disruptions, or deviations within an organization. The goal of incident management is to identify incidents quickly, limit their impact, clearly assign responsibilities, and initiate appropriate corrective and preventive actions. Depending on the business context, incidents may include IT disruptions, security incidents, quality deviations, compliance violations, or operational disruptions.
Incident Reporting: Capturing incidents through forms, portals, mobile apps, or automated interfaces.
Categorization and Prioritization: Classifying incidents by type, severity, urgency, impact, and affected business areas.
Ticket and Case Management: Managing incidents as tickets or cases with status, assignees, deadlines, and processing history.
Workflow Management: Automatically routing incidents to the responsible individuals, teams, or escalation levels.
Escalation Management: Triggering notifications or forwarding critical incidents when deadlines are missed or issues remain unresolved.
Action Management: Planning, assigning, and monitoring corrective and preventive actions.
Documentation and Tracking: Recording all relevant information, decisions, actions, and communications related to the incident.
Notifications and Communication: Informing relevant stakeholders via email, system alerts, dashboards, or integrations with communication tools.
Root Cause Analysis: Supporting the analysis of causes, patterns, and recurring incidents.
Dashboards and Reporting: Evaluating incident volumes, resolution times, escalations, causes, and action status.
Audit Trail and Compliance Evidence: Maintaining traceable records of changes, processing steps, and responsibilities.
An IT service team records a server outage, prioritizes the incident as critical, and automatically forwards it to the on-call team.
A company documents a data protection incident, records the assessment, and monitors the initiated actions.
A production department reports a quality deviation, analyzes the root cause, and tracks corrective actions through to completion.
A facility management team handles a fault report for defective equipment and informs the responsible technicians.
An information security officer assesses suspicious access to company systems and documents the response to the security incident.
