Understand the purpose and objectives of incident management in reducing downtime by resolving incidents quickly. Be able to describe the scope and basic concepts such as major incidents, incident models, and the importance of timely resolution. Identify sources of incident reports other than users reporting them to the service desk; suppliers, support staff, or event management alerts are all possible sources. Understand that incident management is a reactive process. Be able to list and explain the interfaces that incident management has with other processes, especially problem management and service-level management.

Understand that the aim of incident management is to restore service, not to identify the cause. This focus on service restoration means that less-skilled staff are required to resolve incidents than problems. Be able to describe the differences between an incident, a problem, and a service request.

Explain how priority is calculated, using business impact and urgency. Understand what these terms mean.

Be able to explain the concept of incident and problem models and their use. Be able to describe the lifecycle of an incident and the use of the different statuses assigned to each stage. Be able to list the key information that would be recorded in an incident record. Be able to describe the difference between the two types of escalation (hierarchic and functional) and when each is used.

Understand the purpose, objectives, scope, basic concepts, process activities, and interfaces of problem management. Understand that a problem is the unknown, underlying cause of one or more incidents and that the aim of problem management is to find the cause of incidents and remove it to prevent recurrence. Be able to describe the relationship between problem management and other processes.

Understand the concepts of a workaround and a known error. Be able to explain why some problems might not resolved, when it is not cost-effective to implement the fix, and when a workaround exists. Be able to explain how the known error database is used.