Lessons · IT support · incident, request, problem

Incident, service request, problem: three words for three different jobs

An incident is something that was working and is not. A service request is somebody asking for a thing that is not broken: a new account, a second monitor. A problem is the cause behind repeated incidents, and it gets its own record so somebody hunts the cause while the desk keeps restoring service.

Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.

What it is for

A queue with forty tickets in it is only workable if you know which are fires. 'Printer on floor 2 is down' and 'please give the new starter a printer' look the same in a list, and one of them has twelve people waiting. The label decides who works it, how fast, and whether anybody ever asks why it keeps happening.

How to think about it

Ask one question: was it working before? Yes and now it is not: incident, restore it. It was never meant to be there yet: service request, fulfil it. The same incident for the third time: leave the incident open, open a problem record beside it, and link them, so the fix for the user and the hunt for the cause are two tickets and not one argument.

Worked example

'My email stopped syncing at ten' → incident

Was working, is not. Restore it first, understand it second.

'Can I have access to the sales share' → service request

Nothing is broken. It goes through whoever approves access, on the request queue.

'Third time this week the Wi-Fi in room 4 drops' → incident, plus a problem record

Each drop is an incident, restored each time. The pattern is a problem, and it gets a record of its own with the three incidents linked to it.

Your turn

A user asks for a second monitor. Write which of the three kinds of ticket it is.

'Can I have a second monitor' →

The trap

Closing the incident once the user is working and thinking the job is done, on the third identical incident of the week. The user is fine. The cause is still there, and it will be back on Monday, because nobody opened the problem record.

Practise incident, request, problem on HoneA question on it now, a coding challenge where there is one, and it is remembered for review. Free, no email needed.