Issues Overview

This document provides a general overview of the Issue Management capability within the ICEFLO application.  

ICEFLO is designed specifically and exclusively to support the various business requirements of constructing and executing of Runbooks. It is not intended to fulfill the full suite of business requirements for other ITIL processes, including issue management. However, during the execution of every Runbook, various issues will be encountered that do not necessarily get managed via an ITIL Issue Management process or toolset. Others will relate to ITIL-type processes and ICEFLO allows details to be captured: however, ICEFLO does not seek to replace or replicate these processes.

 

Definition

A key challenges when implementing complex change is to identify, record and manage issues as-and-when they arise. In ICEFLO, some issues have a minor impact only and are recorded simply to capture a record of their occurrence. Other issues can be more significant and may threaten the success of the implementation. ICEFLO handles this wide spectrum of Issues.

The broad definition of a Issue in the ICEFLO solution is:

  1. Any material change to the content of the Runbook from the point at which the plan has been committed
  2. Any significant deviation from the plan during execution. These can arise for a number of reasons, e.g. technical, logistical, operational
  3. Any external event that can result in a change to the execution of the ICEFLO Runbook, e.g. power failure, another major issue in the organisation.

 

Benefits

ICEFLO has a light-weight Issue Management function that robustly integrates the management of these issues with the construction and execution of the Runbook.

The benefits of this robust integration are:

  1. Provides an automated record and audit trail of all changes made to the Runbook after the committed state has been invoked
  2. Greatly enhances the visibility of any issues as they arise during Runbook execution
  3. Immediately identifies or flags the impact these issues have on the overall Runbook timeline
  4. Enables informed decision-making
  5. Expedites the resolution of issues 

Integration

To assist with Issue Management ICEFLO Integrates with Servicenow.

ServiceNow Incident Management supports the incident management process in the following ways:

  • Log Incidents in the instance
  • Classify incidents by impact and urgency to prioritise work
  • Assign to appropriate groups for quick resolution
  • Escalate as necessary for further investigation
  • Resolve the Incident and notify the user who logged it
  • Use reports to monitor, track, and analyse service levels and improvement

ICEFLO allows you to escalate issues and raise Incidents from within the  application and integrate these with ServiceNow.  ICEFLO users can view  key, up-to-date information on the Incident from within ICEFLO. Service Now users can record and track the incident until service is restored and the issue is resolved.