Staying Connected: How Improved Communication Drives Better Incident Management

Creating a strong communications strategy can provide a backbone for your organization’s IT incident management.

Incident management is highly process driven, because you need quick response times. Your service desk tools and related technology must support communication within the organization.

Improving your communication starts with looking at the current state.

Determine how effective your communications are by asking these questions:

• Are you notifying the key members of your organization - the IT support team, the business leaders and the users?
• What communication methods are you using?
• How quickly and frequently during an incident are you sending updates?
• Are you using tech jargon that your users don’t understand?
• Are you providing useful workarounds in your alerts that allow employees to keep working?

Identify Issues

After working through these questions, you’ll see a few issues. Maybe you don’t communicate regularly with your users or maybe your alerts are geared toward technical users and not the typical employee.

Once you have a clear picture of where your communications are failing, identify the root cause of these issues and identify if you need any outside resources to help remedy them.

Correct The Gaps

Once you have the right resources identified, start correcting these issues. If your alerts are filled with jargon, work with a member of your organization’s communication team to craft messages that convey what the problem is and how users can work around it.

If you aren’t communicating regularly with key stakeholders during an incident, think about creating some alert templates for your most likely incidents - system outages, data breaches, planned updates, etc. - so you can more easily communicate with the users and business leaders.

Implement Changes Into Your Process

Once you’ve created the alert templates, updated messaging and other necessary pieces for your communication strategy, update your communication process. If you’re using an IT alerting system, upload the templates and new messaging. If you need to improve response time for your internal IT resources, create escalation paths and triggers.

Test out your new alerting strategy and make sure it’s filling those gaps you identified. Note any remaining issues and incorporate those fixes into your process.

Support The New Process With Technology

Consider how technology can support these changes. If you’re not using an IT alerting system, consider adding one to automate your communications and simplify your alerts. If your organization has an IT alerting system, make sure you’re getting the most out of it by setting up escalation paths, targeted groups and multiple methods of communication.

To learn more about the critical role that communication plays in successful IT incident management, download our new eBook, “Streamlining IT Service Desk Incident Management: 3 Process Changes To Make Now.”

Download the eBook