How to Manage Incidents › Incident Management

Incident Management

As an information technology (IT) analyst or manager, use this article to learn more about managing IT demand in the form of incidents in CA Clarity PPM.

IT organizations want to manage both the demand for services and supply of resources to fulfill incidents and other service requests. Management wants to satisfy the growing needs of its consumers, internal business units, vendors, partners, and other users.

Incidents represent events that do not form part of the standard operation of a service. The incident can potentially cause an interruption to or a reduction in the quality of that service. Incidents include hardware, software, service, and support requests. An IT service request is a type of incident from a user for support, delivery information, access, or documentation. CA Clarity PPM captures information about incidents and service requests from users. The application can then help achieve the following goals:

• Assign the resources that are required to resolve the issue
• Record the exchange of comments between analysts and users
• Identify the resolution
• Track the time that was spent

This information represents key operations and performance data for an IT department. Without incident management, users can experience unnecessary extended interruptions resulting in increased costs to the organization.

Unplanned work includes incidents, ideas, or requests for enhancements that consume resources on a daily basis. The combination of unplanned work and planned project work represents the total IT demand. In addition to planned work, use CA Clarity PPM to assess the cost of unplanned work resulting from incidents, and to monitor your resource utilization.

As an IT service manager or analyst, use CA Clarity PPM to capture, prioritize, manage, and resolve unplanned demand from incidents. Users can create incidents in CA Clarity PPM, or through integrations with other systems that already capture help desk tickets, incidents, and service requests. Typically, the primary data source for incidents is from other systems.

Note: If your organization uses an existing service management vendor, use the XML Open Gateway to capture data in CA Clarity PPM. XOG and the Service Connect integrations to IT Service Management (ITSM) systems support the integrations. You can use the XML Open Gateway to import incidents and any associated notes and effort. Once imported, the incidents are ready to be part of the demand management process.