The Incident Management Process is a key part of the ITIL Service Operation phase of the ITIL Lifecycle. The Incident Management Process deals with service problems that could lead to a decrease in service quality and, consequently, customer satisfaction. An incident is defined as a failure of service quality or degradation of an IT service. An incident in an IT service provider can cause service quality to drop. As explained in ITIL foundation certification training, the Incident Management Process is designed for preventing service quality loss by effectively dealing with incidents. Let’s take a look at the Incident Management Process.

The Incident Management Process’s objective
The incident management process has two main objectives. First, to restore normal service operations as quickly and secondly to minimize the adverse impact on business operations so that availability and quality of services remain at their highest possible levels. These are the main objectives of the Incident Management Process.
An example can help you understand the objective of the Incident Management Process. Let’s say that an ATM’s money withdrawal service is down. This is a critical incident. The Incident Management Process will attempt to restore the money withdrawal service as soon possible to avoid customers complaining about service quality. The ATM displays the nearest ATMs where the customer can withdraw money while the money withdrawal service is down. This helps to minimize the negative impact on customer satisfaction.
Normal service operation is defined as service operation that follows the specifications of SLAs. As we saw, fixing the money withdrawal service is returning to normal service operation. Sometimes, the agreed service levels are not met. These cases are also called incidents. If the agreed service levels for money withdrawal are completed in less than 8 seconds and one of the ATMs completes the transaction in more than 8 seconds, this is an instance of an incident. The agreed service level must be met and fixed as soon as possible.
The Incident Management Process’s scope
What is the scope and purpose of the Incident Management Process The Incident Management Process covers any event that could interrupt or interrupt a service. Any kind of event, issue, or problem that could cause service delivery disruptions or degradation must be addressed immediately.

Incident Management Processes allow for the reporting and/or logging of incidents by trained staff. An IT Service provider can have many events. However, if an event causes unacceptable service levels to be not met, it is considered an incident by the specialized staff. Both locking a user account if a password is entered incorrectly three more times or the failure of an application servers are examples of events. The locking of a user account is not an event. However, if the proper actions are taken, the account can be unlocked. This will not affect the delivery of service to other users of the IT Service provider. An application server failure can affect other users. This should be reported to the specialized staff.
Both incidents and service requests are covered by the Incident Management Process. Service requests include, for example, the changing of personnel’s notebooks every three years and updating all relevant applications. These types of service requests and related issues are called “service requests”.