Incident management template

Every project faces unexpected issues or obstacles. When these come up, an incident management template helps your team track problems, collaborate in real time, and resolve issues before they escalate. This guide explains what incident management is, how the process works, and what to include in your template to handle problems quickly and with confidence.

What is incident management?

Incident management is the process of identifying, documenting, and resolving unplanned disruptions to restore normal operations as quickly as possible. It provides a structured way to log incidents, assign owners, and track progress, preventing small issues from escalating into larger problems. For example, IT teams use incident management to address cybersecurity threats, while web teams use it to identify and fix system failures and bugs.

What is an incident management template?

An incident management template is a ready-made structure you can use to set up an incident tracker for any project. It takes some effort to create at first, but it saves time on future projects.

A good incident template typically includes fields for:

• Incident description: A brief summary of what happened

• Severity level: How critical the issue is (e.g., low, medium, high, critical)

• Assignee: Who is responsible for investigating and resolving the incident

• Status: Where the incident stands (e.g., open, in progress, resolved)

• Root cause: The underlying reason the incident occurred

• Affected systems: Which tools, services, or processes were disrupted

How the incident management process works

Many teams use a structured approach based on the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) method. This method divides incident management into five main steps:

1. Identification: Recognize that an incident has occurred through monitoring tools, user reports, or team observations. The sooner you detect an issue, the faster you can respond.

2. Categorization: Classify the incident by type and affected area, such as a security breach, software bug, or hardware failure. This helps your team route it to the right people and spot recurring patterns that may require problem management.

3. Prioritization: Assess the issue's business impact and urgency to determine how quickly it needs attention. A severity scale (low, medium, high, or critical) helps your team focus on what matters most.

4. Response and resolution: Investigate the root cause, assign a clear owner, and document every step taken. The goal is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible.

5. Closure and review: Once the incident is resolved, close it in your tracker and conduct an after-action review. Documenting lessons learned helps your team improve its response for future incidents.

If your template includes these five steps, your team will have a reliable way to manage issues from beginning to end.

The benefits of a digital incident management template

Incident management is more than just listing issues as they happen. Your team needs to track progress in real time, which isn't possible with static spreadsheets or PDFs. A digital incident management template gives everyone one place to see updates, who is working on each issue, and what has been done.

When you create an incident tracker in a project management tool instead of a static document, you can:

• See all in-progress and resolved incidents in one place.

• Record and track incidents in real time.

• Share incident status with stakeholders.

• Collaborate on incidents in the same place you track them.

• Assign owners and deadlines so it's clear who should address incidents by when.

• Update due dates, statuses, and owners when priorities change.

• Attach relevant screenshots, documents, or spreadsheets.

• Move quickly and still ensure everyone is on the same page.

• Report on the number and type of incidents you resolved.

What to include in your incident management template

An incident management template helps you spot possible risks, assess them, and take action. To track incidents effectively, your digital plan should provide enough detail so all stakeholders can find the information they need in one place.

Integrated features

• Custom fields. Create unique custom fields to tag, sort, and filter incidents by any information you need to track, from priority and status to affected system. Share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization.

• Automation. Rules in Asana function on a trigger-and-action basis: "when X happens, do Y." Use Rules to automatically assign incidents, adjust due dates, set custom fields, and notify stakeholders, so your team spends less time on busywork.

• Forms. When someone fills out a Form, it appears as a new task in your Asana project, so you can standardize incident reporting and ensure no issue falls through the cracks. Use branching logic to tailor questions based on a user's previous answer.

• Board View. Board View displays your incidents in columns organized by status (like To Do, In Progress, and Resolved) so you can track work as it moves through stages. Each card shows the task title, due date, and custom fields for at-a-glance insight into where things stand.

Recommended apps

• Jira. Create interactive, connected workflows between technical and business teams to increase real-time visibility into the product development process, all without leaving Asana. Quickly create Jira issues directly in Asana, so work is seamless between business and technical teams at the right time.

• GitHub. Automatically sync GitHub pull request status updates to Asana tasks. Track pull request progress and improve cross-functional collaboration between technical and non-technical teams, all from within Asana.

• Zendesk. With the Zendesk integration, users can quickly and easily create Asana tasks directly from Zendesk tickets. Add context, attach files, and link existing tasks to track work needed to close out the ticket.

• Salesforce. Remove bottlenecks by enabling sales, customer success, and service teams to communicate directly with their support teams in Asana. With Service Cloud, connect your implementation and service teams with supporting teams in Asana to deliver amazing customer experiences.

Manage incidents with Asana

A digital incident management template in Asana gives your team one place to log issues, assign owners, and track resolution in real time. Instead of scrambling across spreadsheets and email threads, you get shared visibility into every incident from start to finish. Get started with a free template and give your team the structure they need to respond faster.

FAQs about incident management templates