Best Practice: "Converting" an incident to a Demand, Story, etc...

[Brian Bouchard]

Wondering what is considered best practice for handling "tickets" in general when they come in through an incident, but need to be "converted" to something else, like a Demand, story, or a simple change.  For example, a user opens up an incident indicating some functionality is missing. We agree it is an incident, but the fix is "bigger than a bread box" so we open a Demand (could be a Story or maybe a change) for planning and tracking the amount of this size effort.  I'm not resolving the incident until the resulting Demand is complete and implemented through a Change Request.  Currently, I'm putting the Incident in a state of "Awaiting Resolution" and linking the incident as a parent of the Demand for tracking purposes.  However, there is an effort to measure how well we're addressing incidents based on how long they have been open, so if it takes 2 months to prioritize and implement a fix for the incident, my incident is in the "2 months since it's been opened" list.

This doesn't really bother me, since I can filter on the "Awaiting Resolution" State, but I'm curious if there is a best practice around this level of service management...

1. Is it better to leave the incident open until the issue is ultimately resolved and filter out based on something like the state of "Awaiting Resolution" to remove things that you know are waiting to be prioritized and implemented?
2. Is there a preferred way (or state?) to resolve an incident once the other task has been created that indicates the incident still isn't fully resolved, but will be handled through this other process/task type?
3. Should there be an "Unresolved - moved to Demand" type state, that could then be automatically updated to Resolved when the child Demand is completed?
4. Is there some other preferred option I haven't thought of?

[Mike Allen]

Absolutely, I agree.  I always like to keep these things in the reporting because it shines the world's biggest spotlight on the issues inherent in the system, and gives management ammo to go talk to upper management and drive real change.