Issue Log is Not Incident

Some projects loves issue log and issue reporting a lot. I greatly discourage these as they are a negative reporting compared to backlogs. You will also know this issue log comes from a waterfall approach. Thus, someone will try to run issue log like incident management. Although this is not wrong, there are some distinct differences between issue log and incident management that you must take note.

Incident is not Issue

An incident is an occurrence of event that stop the user from completing your task. This usually have priority and severity to the incident. Not all incident are issues, as they will need to be classify further. Usually, RCA (Root Cause Analysis) will be performed for severity 1 incident. The objective of incident is to clear the incident as fast as possible. This is also known as SLA (Service Level Agreement). Unlike incident, the objective of issue log is to permanently fix the issue. This is a key reason why incident management is different from issue log.

Incident is not a Change

Users often raise changes as incidents. A change is not clocked to SLA but classify as enhancement request. An experienced PM will be able to flag these request if this is a small project. Similarly, issue log is not for change. Any change to the intended scope will be logged as a change request (CR). The CR should not be critical to the project timeline.

Management of issue log must not be confused with incident management. If you really want to apply incident management to your issue log, then you must be aware that the rules are changed.