When incidents happen, speed is key. Organize and track incidents as they occur so you can find solutions fast. Learn how to create an incident management template in Asana.
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No plan is perfect, so it’s normal to run into issues or roadblocks during a project. When that happens, you need a way to track incidents, collaborate in real time, and find solutions before little problems become big ones.
The solution? An incident management template.
Incident management is a process that helps you track and respond to issues quickly. It’s a way to document incidents, triage them to the appropriate team members, and find solutions before roadblocks can derail a project or business process. For example, IT teams use incident management to detect and address cybersecurity incidents, while web teams use it to identify and fix system failures and bugs.
An incident management template is a reusable guide that lets you quickly set up an incident management tracker for any project. Instead of creating a tracker from scratch, you can duplicate the template and kickstart your incident management process right away. Creating an incident management template requires a bit of up-front effort, but it can save you valuable time at the start of every future project.
There’s more to incident management than just writing down issues as they occur. In order to come up with solutions quickly, your whole team needs to see how incidents are progressing in real time. However, that type of dynamic tracking isn’t possible with static Excel spreadsheets or PDFs.
A digital incident management template provides a single source of truth for your team. As an incident unfolds, you can update your tracker with new information to show your whole team what changed, who’s working on it, and what they’ve done so far in real time.
When you create an incident tracker in a project management tool instead of a static document, you can:
An incident management template can help you quickly identify potential vulnerabilities, conduct a risk assessment, and take necessary corrective actions. To effectively track potential incidents, your digital incident management plan should provide enough context and information so all of your stakeholders can access important information in one place.
Any team who responds to incidents can benefit from an incident management template. This usually includes teams that work on information security, IT, web development, human resources, manufacturing, education, workplace safety, and even law enforcement—though that list is by no means exclusive. Even if you’re a project manager at a tech company, you can use an incident management template to respond to roadblocks within projects.
The short answer? You can track any type of incident you want. Keep in mind that the definition of “incident” varies between teams. For example, IT staff handle computer security incidents like firewall or data breaches, while law enforcement officials create incident reports to document crimes within their jurisdiction. Other types of incidents might include malware attacks, authentication errors, site outages, website bugs, manufacturing defects, and customer complaints.
Tracking incidents helps you respond quickly to issues when they occur, so you can prevent roadblocks from derailing a project or process. It also gives you a way to delegate tasks to your incident response team—because as you record incidents, you can assign them to specific team members to investigate. And finally, tracking incidents provides a clear picture of the issues you’re dealing with and how you’re tackling them, so your team and stakeholders are always looped in.
First, determine the key information you need to know about each incident in order to track and respond to it. Then, use that information to create your incident management template—so when an incident occurs, all you need to do is fill in the blanks. For example, if you work on a security team, you’ll use your template to track security breaches. To do that, you need to track the following information: description, assignee, severity, affected systems, date, escalation, and root cause.
When incidents occur, add them to your incident management tracker and record any relevant information. As your team works to address the issue, update the incident accordingly so everyone can see the incident’s status in real time.
An incident management tracker allows your team to see every incident and its status in one place. It provides key information about each incident so your team has the context they need to find a solution. On the other hand, an incident response plan lays out your approach to incident handling—like incident response procedures, incident response policies, and your overarching incident response process.