Using Major Incidents in TeamDynamix

See also: Definitions for various ticket types, including Incident and Major Incident

What are Major Incidents for?

The intention for this ticket classification is to serve as an at-a-glance listing of ongoing IT impacts/outages that are likely to affect the campus community.

Within the TDNext application, technicians can check the ticket report titled "Major Incidents - New and In Process" for a list of current Major Incidents.

When should a Major Incident be created?

Mainly, when an Incident occurs that may prompt the creation of many tickets, communication to campus, etc.

If several Incident tickets created all at roughly the same time appear to have the same underlying cause, consider creating a Major Incident ticket to group them together.

Examples:

  • A widely used web service is down, and many users are not able to log in.
  • A technical glitch is affecting a crucial feature and many users have reported this.
  • An unplanned technical incident that requires communication to the campus community.

Who should create a Major Incident?

Any team that notices a Major Incident can create one. In many cases, technicians who directly support end-users will be the first to notice incoming ticket trends.

Adding child tickets to a Major Incident

If a Major Incident does not already exist, create a new parent ticket:

  1. Open the ticket in TDNext
  2. Click the Actions button
  3. Click Create Parent
  4. Click Major Incident Form
  5. Review the details on the form, adjust as needed
  6. Click Save

If a Major Incident already exists, set the parent ticket:

  1. Open the ticket in TDNext
  2. Click the Actions button
  3. Click Set Parent
  4. Enter the ticket # for the ticket that you wish to set as parent
  5. Click Save

In addition, it is possible to add more children from the Major Incident itself:

  1. Open the Major Incident in TDNext
  2. Click the Children tab
  3. Use "Add Existing" or "Add New", as needed

Communication and updates

Updates to the Major Incident can easily be carbon copied to the Technotice mailing list by adding "Chico Technotice" as a contact on the ticket.

When updating a Major Incident ticket, consider carefully if you should use the Cascade option to apply the update to any child tickets; this can be useful for updating the status of many tickets at once, or for messaging many users.

Review

When practical, please review each child ticket to make sure that it is correctly associated with the Major Incident. If a ticket is associated erroneously and then closed once the Major Incident is resolved, that could be confusing and frustrating for users.

Major Incidents will be reviewed periodically by a technical working group to ensure regular monitoring, identify opportunities for improvement, and coordinate best practices.

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