The aim of incident management is to restore the agreed service for the business and respond to service enquiries as quickly as possible.

In order to fulfill the specification requirements it is necessary to ensure that the incident management is designed as a reactive and proactive process that responds to error messages. The process must focus on the restoration of the IT service concerned and consciously not deal with the identification of the root cause.

The incident process (incidents and service requests) comprises receiving calls, recording, prioritization, taking account of security provisions as well as following up on the incident processing status. It should also govern the agreement on fault processing with the customer as well as any escalation procedures. All incidents must be recorded in such a way as to enable the relevant information to rectify the error to be ascertained and analyzed.

The progress of work should be reported to the current and any potential personnel affected. All activities must be fully recorded in the incident ticket.

Wherever possible, customers must be able to continue their business in the appropriate way. Workarounds can also be utilized for this purpose

For comparison see the Incident Management Process according ITIL V3.