Grateful for the wisdom of the forum.
I'm not an ITIL professional, or even an IT one. I'm a user of various Log IT at a large governmental organisation (you could probably call me a super-user, others within that organisation look to me for advice, so I deal with many incidents) . We have essentially outsourced our IT to a commercial contractor including Incident Management.
A lot of my questions to how that Incident Management process is run tend to run along the lines of, well that's standard ITIL practice. Which I feel is kind of frustrating as ITIL is essentially a walled garden, it is not a Reference I can pull off a shelf and see how it works - it sits behind a firewall which you (or your organisation) needs to pay for.
I'd therefore be grateful for any advice on what is 'standard ITIL practice' with the following questions:
a. An incident is raised. A workaround solution is provided and a problem is correspondingly raised. What happens to the original incident? Is it kept open until the problem is resolved or is it closed at the point the problem is raised.
b. If the correct solution is to 'close' an incident when a problem is raised, what is the terminology for that. For instance is the term escalated used?
c. Generally I understand the terms 'resolved' to mean that the desk operator considers it over, 'closed' is when the customer considers it over (though not everyone uses these terms). What if the user wants to keep the incident open until the underlying problem is closed? Is this acceptable?
d. What's the standard feedback loop to the user for a problem as opposed to an incident. So the user who reports the incident gets told when the incident is closed, but how do they get informed when the problem gets closed. As I see it under ITIL the end user has no real idea how the problem is progressing!
Anyway grateful for your thoughts. Appreciate your reply in advance.
Yours
Matt
