I heard two different opinions on closing the Service Call ticket. When I was attending the ITIL Foundation for ITSM training, the trainer said that the Service Call ticket cannot be closed when we are using the workaround to temporary solve the incident. The ticket will remain open until the permanent solution applied.
In other product briefing workshop, the trainer told me that the aim of Incident Management is to restore the service as soon as possible, it doesn’t matter whether we use workaround or permanent solution. In this case the ticket can be closed when the service return back to normal even if tomorrow the user call again reporting the same problem.
Need feedback on this issue.
I think there are situations where the Incident can be closed to a Workaround, and a second or even third Incident should be opened to restore the user to a normal state and undo the Workaround without involving Problem Management.
An example would be a user calls the Service Desk because they are unable to print to a networked printer. The Service Desk person implements an approved Workaround by routing the user to another, equally capable networked printer. Incident number one is now closed.
But the original printer is still broken. A second Incident is opened to address the broken printer. This would not go to PM because you are not going to do any Root Cause analysis, just swap the broken printer out with a working one. Incident two closed.
A third Incident could then be opened by the user requesting that they be re-routed back to their original printer (although, at this point it is probably a Service Request, since there is no loss of service involved). Incident number three closed.
Now I have been in a room of ITIL experts who have discussed different ways automated systems could handle this, including Incidents and sub-Incidents with parent child relationships. But the fact is that if the user’s service was restored but then left in a less than desirable state (but within the agreed SLA), a second Incident probably needs to be opened to address restoring them to their original state.
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