SmartSuite for the Incident and Problem Manager

Standardized categories, priorities, ownership and queues mean a P1 is a P1 on every shift, and the escalation path you defined fires automatically on category and urgency rather than on who happens to be on duty.

Real-time status communication keeps affected users, the Service Desk Manager and leadership informed from the same incident record, so the bridge call is spent on restoration rather than on repeating where things stand.

Each post-incident review produces actions with owners and due dates tracked in the same workspace, so the improvements agreed after a major incident are followed through rather than filed with the report.

Problem Management links repeat incidents to a single root cause and known error, so the Service Desk Manager's analysts see the workaround on the ticket and you see the pattern building rather than another isolated ticket.

SLA and OLA enforcement tracks response and resolution clocks with escalations, so a ticket approaching breach reaches you and the Service Desk Manager while there is still time to act on it.

When the Security Operations Manager's incident is also an outage, one record holds both workstreams with shared tasks and one timeline, so containment and restoration do not run on separate clocks.

Every action, decision and approval on a major incident is recorded with its timestamp, so the staged reports DORA and NIS2 require, or an internal review, come from the record rather than from memory.

Continuous improvement insights analyze incident trends over time, so when you ask the IT Service Manager to fund a permanent fix the case rests on recurrence data rather than on the last bad week.

Known errors and workarounds feed Knowledge Management, so the IT Operations Director's teams and the service desk resolve the next occurrence from the article while the permanent fix waits for its change window.

IT Service Manager

The Incident and Problem Manager owns restoration and prevention. On the incident side, that means the incident process, priorities and escalation rules, coordinating major incidents and their communications to resolution and running post-incident reviews with tracked actions. On the problem side, it means problem records, root cause analysis, known errors and driving permanent fixes through change. They report incident trends and the problem backlog to IT leadership, which is how the two halves are judged together.

IT Incident Management coordinates major incidents with timelines, tasks, stakeholder updates and post-incident review actions. The timeline records what happened and when, tasks are assigned to the people restoring service, stakeholder updates go out from the same record, and the review actions are captured when the incident closes rather than lost in a meeting. The Service Desk Manager and Security Operations Manager see the same incident, so communication during restoration comes from one place.

Problem Management manages problem records with root cause analysis, known errors and linked incidents and changes. Each problem shows the incidents that raised it, the analysis of the root cause, the known error and workaround while a fix is pending, and the change that will remove it. That linkage is what lets the Incident and Problem Manager show that recurring incidents are being prevented, not just restored, and it is the problem backlog they report on.

Change Management raises changes for permanent fixes and tracks them to deployment, linked back to the problem record that justified them. The Incident and Problem Manager can see which problems have a change raised, where that change sits with the Change and Release Manager and when it was deployed, and then confirm the related incidents stop recurring. Knowledge Management holds the known errors and workarounds so the service desk applies them consistently in the meantime.

SmartSuite reports incident trends, MTTR and problem backlog to IT leadership from the incident and problem records themselves. The Incident and Problem Manager can show the IT Service Manager and IT Operations Director how time to restore is moving, which services generate repeat incidents and how many problems are open with and without a change raised. Because the data comes from the records, the trend is defensible when regulators such as DORA or NIS2 supervisors ask about the incident history.

An IT team needs its incident priority matrix, escalation rules and the list of open problems and known errors. New customers can start with SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four-week program around one or two priority workflows; for this role the first workflow is major incident coordination in IT Incident Management, with Problem Management following. Historic incidents give the trend reporting a baseline, and the service desk keeps logging incidents in the same records.