The Incident Management Lifecycle — and Where Escalation Breaks Down

There’s a disruption. Your incident management system detects the disruption, triggering a process that categorizes it, assigns it to the right person, and escalates it as necessary. But that escalation often brings a common problem: the incident disappears. That’s because most of the incident management lifecycle happens in a system like ServiceNow while the actual work involved in resolving that disruption happens in a tool like Azure DevOps.

In this guide, we’ll cover the incident management lifecycle in detail, why it breaks down with escalation, and how you can fix it.

What the incident management lifecycle actually covers

Most IT teams have a pre-defined process for managing incidents. Here are the most common steps in that process.

Detection and identification

Incidents are typically detected through a number of channels, including IT monitoring systems, help desk tickets, and chat apps. This may involve some level of intervention from human support agents, or may be completely automated with an ITSM (IT Service Management) platform. These platforms can identify incidents no matter where they begin, and centralize them for the rest of the lifecycle.

Logging and categorization

Logging records incidents for future visibility and auditability, as well as facilitating documentation as an incident is worked on. This also enables trend analysis for improving your ITSM function over time. Categorization, on the other hand, sorts incidents so they can be routed to the proper system, department, or person.

Prioritization

Incident management involves a robust prioritization system that pre-determines the amount of resources a particular incident requires. Factors determining this include urgency, impact, and incident age. Typically, ITSM involves SLA (Service Level Agreement) tiers that determine the speed at which IT teams need to respond.

Response and escalation

Once an incident is identified, logged, and prioritized, it needs to actually be addressed. First-level technical support agents will typically try to troubleshoot the disruption. At that point, if they aren’t able to resolve the issue, they’ll escalate it as needed. This is where the ticket associated with an incident might leave an initial ITSM system for a more specialized tool.

Resolution and closure

After the work to fix an incident is actually done, it needs to be officially resolved and closed. That involves validating that the issue is actually resolved — either by manually checking with impacted people or through automated system checks. From there, you might need to formally close the incident in your ITSM system, report on its conclusion, and notify stakeholders.

Review and learnings

The incident management lifecycle doesn’t just involve detecting and resolving incidents; it also requires consistent learning and improvement. Every incident should trigger a review that covers impacted systems (e.g., features or issues that led to the incident), your response (e.g., response times, workflows, responsibilities), and your documentation (e.g., troubleshooting guides, templated answers). This ensures you’re improving the way you manage incidents and identifying issues that could lead to further incidents.

How cross-tool escalation breaks the lifecycle

When first-level support agents escalate an incident, it rarely stays in the same system it came through. In fact, it typically goes through a workflow like this one:

1. Frontline support agents log an incident in ServiceNow.
2. The incident is reviewed through first-level triage.
3. The incident can’t be resolved by first-level agents, and it’s escalated to engineers.
4. First-level agents contact engineers through email or Slack to advise them of the escalation.
5. Engineers manually create a work item in Azure DevOps and work on the incident there.
6. End users contact support for updates, and first-level agents contact engineering for an update.
7. As they work on the incident, engineers update agents through email, Slack, or a similar communication channel.
8. First-level agents reach out to end users once they receive an update.
9. The incident is resolved in Azure DevOps, and engineers let first-level agents know.
10. First-level agents close the incident in ServiceNow and notify end users once engineers notify them.

This workflow assumes a minimum of back-and-forth between first-line agents and engineers. Any time an engineer needs additional context, or an agent needs an update, they have to manually send comments and questions through external communication channels — or copy and paste data between tools.

Why these workflows break down

When the incident management lifecycle goes through multiple tools, it can inherently create problems as it helps you solve incidents. Here’s why.

• There’s no connection between work items: When the incident that starts in a tool like ServiceNow is replicated in a tool like Azure DevOps, you’re dealing with two copies of the same incident. Because there’s no link between the two, work happens in each independently, with updates needing to be transferred manually.
• Communication happens invisibly: Incident escalation across tools creates a gap. Engineers work in one tool, front-line agents in another, but they still need to collaborate. Unless one group is able (or willing) to jump that gap, you need other channels to communicate. That communication typically happens in emails or chat apps, completely invisible to regular documentation processes.
• Updates are locked in each platform: As engineers work in tools like Azure DevOps, they generate updates, questions, and comments that never make it to the tool first-line agents use. Similarly, questions, context, and connected incidents are added to tools like ServiceNow. The same incident develops competing histories in both tools, meaning no one quite knows the full story.

The impact of this breakdown

First-line agents and engineers rarely have the same needs when it comes to software tools. But while escalating tickets across tools is essential to managing serious incidents, it creates significant problems for both teams.

• Productivity drag increases: If an incident only lives in one tool, the time needed to update the relevant work item, get context, or share updates is predictable. When it’s spread across multiple tools, the time and work required for any of these tasks can increase exponentially.
• Frustration builds between teams: As engineers and first-line agents try to collaborate despite the gap between their tools, they encounter issues with information-sharing, communication, and more. It’s easy for that frustration to be conceptualized as a “working with engineering” problem rather than a “not having an integration” problem.
• Errors are introduced into your process: Every workflow has its failure points, opportunities for errors to slip into your work. But all the manual work involved in transferring information back and forth between tools creates the added potential for data entry errors, which only compound as you work on an incident.

So how do you resolve these issues?

What integration usually means (and where it falls short)

Integration means bridging the gap between multiple tools. Most organizations use one of the following three approaches.

Manual workarounds

While manual workarounds aren’t a software integration, they’re the closest thing to an integration many teams have to work with. Copying and pasting data, hopping between tools, or relying on communication channels like emails and chat apps are all examples of these workarounds. They might be useful to keep crucial information from falling through the cracks, but they don’t scale. Manual workarounds mean extra work and time. An incident can quickly become unmanageable if resolving it relies on these manual workarounds.

Built-in integrations

Tools like Jira, ServiceNow, and Azure DevOps offer built-in integrations that allow users to push data between them and other systems. ServiceNow, for example, offers a range of integrations across its integration hub, which allows teams to quickly start setting up integrations without any third-party software. For many organizations, these are a natural first step away from manual workarounds. That said, built-in integrations typically cover a smaller library of integrations, and each integration typically supports a limited set of fields.

Automation tools

Automation tools like Zapier and Workato can push data in one direction, allowing you to automate the creation of work items or updating of specific fields. These apps support a wide range of tools, meaning they can cover integrations with your first-line system, your engineering tools, spreadsheets, and more. The problem? They only push data in one direction. While they’ll support moving data from an initial system to the system incidents are escalated to, anything happening in that second system can’t be synced back. This solves the escalation breakdown in one direction, but not the other.

How two-way sync closes the escalation gap

A two-way sync integration does just that; it syncs data back and forth between tools. These platforms build persistent links between work items in your tools (e.g., ServiceNow records and Azure DevOps work items), keeping them up to date as teams work. With these platforms, you can truly close the gap between systems, eliminating manual workarounds without sacrificing data accuracy.

Unito is one of the most popular platforms for this.

Unito is a two-way sync platform with deep integrations for platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, AzureDevOps, Zendesk, and more. It’s a no-code platform, with most Unito users having no technical background and setting up their first integration within minutes. Unito integrations allow you to completely integrate your incident management lifecycle, eliminating hours of manual work and tons of data entry errors.

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