How to Elevate Your Incident Management Response

In the wake of high-profile incidents such as 2024’s CrowdStrike outage and Ticketmaster data breach, incident management has become an even more pressing priority in 2025 than before for many ITSM teams.

Successful incident management is not just about what you do in the moment, it’s what you do to prepare for that moment.

In this blog we’ll discuss:

• Why incident management is so crucial to the long-term health and success of any organization
• A few key risk factors for ineffective or missed resolutions
• Actionable steps you can take to move toward more effective incident management

The Dangers of Poor Incident Management

If your incident management response isn’t up to speed, incidents can escalate to major crises that impact your organization both internally and externally.

When resolutions don’t happen on time, or don’t happen at all, security breaches can spread in scale, or outages can have a greater impact on your customers and become more publicized.

External Impacts

From an external perspective, poor incident management obviously takes a toll on your organization’s reputation. It can make partners and customers more hesitant to work with you in the future—it's no surprise that they don’t want to see their data exposed or essential services disrupted.

Additionally, if an incident was raised to your attention by a customer and they don’t see that issue resolved in a timely manner, they are likely to feel like their issues or feedback are not valued.

Not only can a hit to your organization’s reputation affect you financially through the loss of business, but you may also be financially affected by fines if the incident results in breaking any legal or compliance standard imposed by the government.

Internal Impacts

While handling the external fallout from a poorly resolved incident, you’ll also need to deal with the internal impacts. Employee satisfaction will suffer if your team is not successfully equipped to deal with situations as they arise, especially if they are blamed for the poor response.

Considering all the external and internal impacts that can affect your business when an incident is handled poorly, it’s clear that incident management isn’t something to take lightly. The consequences can be severe, and they only increase in size and scale the longer an incident goes unresolved.

Risk Factors for Poor Incident Management

While you should always be searching for ways to optimize your incident response strategy, there are a few risk factors that make it even more urgent. Recognizing and addressing these risk factors can help you be better prepared for an incident.

Lack of Standardization

Incident response should follow a standardized process, leaving no uncertainty about which actions to take and when. Each team member must be clear on their responsibilities—whether it's addressing feedback, escalating issues to other departments like legal, or involving external consultants when necessary.

When individual team members handle issues in their own way without adhering to a common set of procedures, it increases the risk of miscommunication and may result in missed or delayed responses during critical situations.

Information Silos

Establishing a standardized response plan is no help when an incident arises unless information about how to execute that plan is accessible. That doesn’t just mean that your team needs to have access to the plan. It should be easy to access the plan.

If your team needs to spend time they don’t have searching for information, that is a major red flag when it comes to incident management. Time is of the essence when critical issues arise, and you need to be able to collaborate and solve problems quickly. 

No Retrospectives

When an incident is resolved, do you perform a root cause analysis to determine how it happened in the first place? Do you document the steps that your team took to resolve the issue and the effectiveness of that resolution?

This information is the key to preparing for the next incident. If you don’t take the time to analyze and document a situation, it’s more likely that your team—or future team members—will make the same mistakes.

Incident Management Preparation Checklist

Do you recognize a few of the risk factors for delayed or missed incident management in your own organization? Here are a few best practices you can implement now to improve your position before it’s too late.

Standardized Page Structure

As you develop a standardized process for incident management, templates can be a powerful tool to help you shape and communicate your strategy. Confluence offers templates to get you started with page structure for incident management process documentation.

Confluence Page Tags

Using page labels in Confluence makes your content easier to find. To streamline searches, group all incident management processes, resources, and retrospectives under a single tag. This ensures your team can quickly locate critical information when they need it most.

Process Diagrams

When you’re responding to an incident, you need to process information quickly. Diagrams can help you do that—visualizing steps and responsibilities makes them easier to understand at a glance.

With Gliffy, you can diagram directly in Confluence, meaning you can make your incident management process documentation visual without any external tools or connectors. Like Confluence itself, Gliffy also offers templates for incident management response, including several types of process diagrams.

Gliffy’s Mermaid functionality can help you generate process diagrams even faster. If you don’t know how to use Mermaid syntax, this Mermaid GPT can help you generate the text you need to make your diagram look the way you want. Then, you can copy and paste that text into Gliffy to generate your diagram.

Atlassian Integrations

Another key to effective incident management is making sure your incident management system is surfaced at the right time. Although Confluence page labels help, you can also take it to the next level by integrating your knowledge base with Jira Service Management.

This means Confluence articles included in your process documentation are dynamically associated with the content related to a ticket, including the diagrams within those articles.

Implement More ITSM Best Practices

Incident management is an important aspect of ITSM, but there are plenty of additional areas to analyze and optimize, such as change management, onboarding, and more.

Explore our blog to find more resources for helping your ITSM strategy reach its full potential.

More Resources