Using incident tasks vs child incidents for incident management and multiple vendors are involved?

[Suggy]

Hello,

The customer has outsourced their IT support and operations to two vendors/service providers.

There are some applications for which certain troubleshooting scenarios can be handled by "Vendor/service provider 1". Sometimes they would need further investigation  to be done by "vendor/service provider 2" or additional info would be required by "vendor/service provider 2".

In this case how the incident should be handled?

Available options

Reassign the incident from "vendor/service provider 1"  to "vendor/service provider 2"?

or

use incident task?

or

create child incident?

or

any other solution?

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Suggy 

What do you means by  lies with Vendor 1

Do you have separate field on Inc form to capture it? and how you identify its L0/L1 or L2/L3.  Please provide more details. 

[Suggy]

@Dr Atul G- LNG  Hi Atul, I have updated my question to make it simple. Thanks!!!

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Suggy 

Thanks for update. 

After reading it again, I think, passing the incident to next vendor/ Service Provider is good to go but here i assume, both vendor has access to client instance actually so that both can update the incident when worked upon.

Available options

Reassign the incident from "vendor/service provider 1"  to "vendor/service provider 2"?

Atul: It is recommended.

or

use incident task?

Atul: Only, if vendor has access to task not on full incident. and in this case ownership lies with SD team.

or

create child incident?

Atul: Not recommended. As it will increase a count of incident also again tracing will be difficult. 

or

any other solution?

[Robbie]

Hi @Suggy,

As always - you have interesting questions which require some thought - Thanks... I think - haha ; )

The determining factor for me would be the complexity of the Issue itself and the process and workflow of your org. It won't always be a one size shoe fits all for every incident.

For context and stepping back a bit - let's remind ourselves what the difference is between these records.

An incident task is a subtask of the main incident. It's a way of breaking down and separating out work relating to an incident. Importantly, they do not have their own lifecycle. They are part and related to the main incident itself.

A child incident by contrast whilst can be related to the main incident, does have it's own lifecycle which would be used when the issue has several impacts and requires to be managed and resolved separately from the main 'parent' incident.

To address the reassignment question and practice - this is also a valid use case and process when the issue is not complex, there is no need to separate out any individual tasks or track or measure any related issues separately through it's own lifecycle. USign this practice also means the incident and process itself is streamlined and contained within the one record (Relationships do not need to be managed or catered for).

If various restrictions are required on who can see what - for example, only the assigned group/group members can see an incident - this can be easily be controlled via on before query business rules.

So in summary, understanding the context and what each records intention and purpose is, I can foresee a hybrid approach whereby the complexity of the incident itself drives the usage. However - I appreciate this may not exactly give you a definitive answer but help you decide)

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Thanks, Robbie