The major incident process - (Magnum MIP)

There is a close relationship between problem management and the major incident process. Dealing with these processes is much like conducting a private investigation and hence the naming of this methodology as Magnum MIP, after the TV series.

An incident is any event that is not part of the standard operation of a service and that causes an interruption or a reduction in the quality of that service. Incidents are recorded in a standardized system which is used for documenting and tracking outages and disruptions. A Major Incident is an unplanned or temporary interruption of service with severe negative consequences. Examples are outages involving core infrastructure equipment/services that affects a significant customer base, such as isolation of a company site, which is considered a Major Incident. Any equipment or service outage that does not meet the criteria necessary to qualify as a Major Incident is either a Moderare, Minor or Normal Incident. Major incident reports are escalated to the problem manager for quality assurance.

Incident Pyramid

The scale of incidents follows an Incident Pyramid where the most incidents are normal, escalating up to a singular Major Incident.

The major incident process, the Magnum MIP methodology, consists of following components:

• Impact assessment: Classification, outage analysis and risk management.
• Measurement using the Incident User Metric (IUM).
• Grading the resouces involved in a major incident.

Major incidents can be seen in the context of the Magnum MIP quad. In this quad major incidents are either failures or misses and result from undesired outcomes. The differene between a miss and a failure is that the former is associated with desired activity while the latter is not. Success is measured as having both desired activity and outcomes. In the context of problem management a lucky break, desired outcome associated wih undesired activtity, is not optimal and should be investigated.

Iceberg

Incidents are a portion of activity in problem management that form the tip of an iceberg. The major incident process deals with the visible portion of the iceberg, while in the greater field of problem management a large number of non-visible issues are lurking.

Documents

An example major incident draft template is available here. An example incident consequence analysis template is available here. This can be used as the Major Incident Summary Report.

The following consolidated worksheet forms the engine room of the process and is used to produce the graphs in the reports.