Crisis & Incident management.

Crisis management

A crisis is a major, unpredictable event that threatens to harm an organization and its stakeholders. Although crisis events are unpredictable, they are not unexpected. Crises can affect all segments of society – businesses, churches, educational institutions, families, non-profits and the government and are caused by a wide range of reasons. Although the definitions can vary greatly, three elements are common to most definitions of crisis:

v  A threat to the organization,

v  The element of surprise,

v  A short decision time.

Sudden Crises, such as fires, explosions, natural disasters, workplace violence, etc.; Smoldering Crises, problems or issues that start out small and could be fixed or averted if someone was paying attention or recognized the potential for trouble; a one-of-a-kind crisis; and, Perceptual Crises.

The practice of crisis management involves attempts to eliminate technological failure as well as the development of formal communication systems to avoid or to manage crisis situations, and is a discipline within the broader context of management. Crisis management consists of skills and techniques required to assess, understand, and cope with any serious situation, especially from the moment it first occurs to the point that recovery procedures start.

Crisis management consists of methods used to respond to both the reality and perception of crises such as a Crisis Management Plan. Crisis management also involves establishing metrics to define what scenarios constitute a crisis and should consequently trigger the necessary response mechanisms. It consists of the communication that occurs within the response phase of emergency management scenarios.

The related terms [emergency management] and [business continuity management] focus respectively on the prompt but short lived "first aid" type of response (e.g. putting the fire out) and the longer term recovery and restoration phases (e.g. moving operations to another site). Crisis is also a facet of [risk management], although it is probably untrue to say that Crisis Management represents a failure of Risk Management since it will never be possible to totally mitigate the chances of catastrophes occurring.

Crisis management is occasionally referred to as [incident management], although several industry specialists argue that the term crisis management is more accurate.

Incident management

The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. ‘Normal service operation’ is defined here as service operation within Service Level Agreement limits.

Objectives - Provide a consistent process to track incidents that ensures:    

v  Incidents are properly logged

v  Incidents are properly routed

v  Incident status is accurately reported

v  Rank of unresolved incidents is visible and reported

v  Incidents are properly prioritized and handled in the appropriate sequence

v  Resolution Provided Meets the Requirements of the service level agreement for the customer.

There are three grades of Impact on Incident:

v  Low

v  Medium

v  High

Target Times:

Priority	Target
	Response	Resolve
3 - Low	24 hours	7 days*
2 - Medium	2 hours	2 days
1 - High	1 hour	5  hours