Moving incidents between teams - Best practices?

[chrisfreeman]

What are best practices for moving incidents between teams ? We have just started out and looking for information on how best to handle incidents that leave the service desk to other teams.   Specifically :

1. How should the escalation team move the incidents back to the service desk ?
2. How do I create child tickets or tasks related to the original incident (update schema, add user to db, change name, etc) that may cross different teams?
3. Any other suggestions on how to setup notifications to best ensure our incidents are handled in a timely manner ?

Thank you for your assistance!

[Bryan Campbell]

I work for a Health Care Agency and completely agree.   There definitely needs to be buy in and the tickets should not ping pong but we've made the decision that it should go back to the service desk as we found the ping pong originates from the other teams trying to find the correct group.   Our Service Desk is the entry point so they have some understanding of what each team is responsible for.   On the other hand when it comes to the escalation teams they really focus on what it is they are responsible for and in some case 1 or 2 other teams they may work closely with.   It goes back to what Brad mentioned about the company culture.   This works for us which has eliminated a lot of down time with a total staff of 9 on our service desk supporting over 15,000 users.

[Vladi1]

We have 2 notifications for incidents assigned to my group (based on priority). They are send to on-call (or primary contact for the group) whenever "assignment group" is changed.

Brad's recommendation is best practice that we use for reassigning incidents between groups.    

[nareshsamlal]

This is a great question and I believe it really boils down to your culture, as far as what's acceptable to the various functional IT groups.

Drawing on my experience of being in several industries and organizations, I found that leaner Service Desks would need to escalate the Incident over to the functional group for action and closure. This tends to be a more efficient process, however, the downside to this that you're now exposing your advanced teams to end users and creates for an opportunity for the user to go to them directly, or at least try to.

The other scenario is a more customer service friendly approach where upon resolution by the functional team, the Incident would be handed back to the Service Desk to touch base with the customer and confirm resolution prior to closing the Incident. There's a lot of value to this model but it requires more bodies than demand needs. You can also accomplish a similar result with surveys, and other feedback channels. Hope this helps!

[k_s_]

We are facing this difficult choice as well. You've written down exactly the choice that has to be made. On paper (or a computer screen) it al looks logically and straight forward, however, reality is always completely different.

Biggest problem: How do you decide whether to go with the lean-principle or the customer friendly approach? Both values are massively supported in our company.

The hardest part is (in our case) staffing, you really need the bodies to carry the workload, and we don't have them.

The exposure of the advanced teams can easily be masked by shortened email signatures, displaying general phone number on calls and sending emails using a general email address.

[nareshsamlal]

Kristof,

By admitting to not having the bodies to carry the workload, that actually answers your question. Enforcing that the business continuously goes to the Service Desk instead of advanced teams is a joint effort by the entire team to drive users to go through the Service Desk. They shouldn't perform any work unless it comes through the Service Desk etc. Its a culture change but can be very effective and quite common.