I have been working on request fulfillment process for the past couple months. Initially, I have had thoughts run from east to west. But, after having spent a few weeks on the process, I am convinced that the two needs to exist as parallels.

An incident is based on a service that has already been provided to the customer. A customer raises an incident as he/she detects an abnormality in the service provisioned. So, in essence, by raising an incident, no additions would be done to the infrastructure or to the existing configuration.

Customers raise service requests if they need to add on an additional service to the existing set. The customer isn’t reporting a problem or abnormality in the service. As the request is a process of adding on new items to the existing ones, it is completely different from an incident standpoint although the same teams may be involved in fulfilling requests as well as resolving incidents.

There is a good possibility that most service requests are associated with a cost whereas incidents are mostly taken care of by the underlying SLAs and OLAs.

For an organization to display its robust IT structure on the basis of the latest ITIL, it is absolutely necessary for the two processes to exist separately although the same teams may be involved in fulfilling them.

Well, change management also contributes to the cause of request fulfillment, right? I will discuss on change management in my next post. Until then, if you have any queries or comments, feel free to raise it.