Application Support in Production Environment

[rmcog]

I've been recetly assigned to a new project of managing Production finicaial application support of level 1 and 2.
There are different types of issues and service requests that needs to be catered based on the severities.At Level1 it could be batch jobs monitoring,health check,data update in the database,data refresh.At level 2 it could be Root cause finding,support other processes like change and config and support the dev in resolving the issues.
There are also very challenging SLAs attached to each of the severities.
At this point of time my time is really not able to meet the client expectations and there are many escalations happening.

I've been trying to implement the incident mgmt(we use Peregrine) process but without much of success.
Current incident mgmt process:

We either get incident tickets/service requests in form of emails or chat and issue identified through proactive monitoring.
For the cases where tickets(90%) are not raised my level-1 team is suppoed to create the ticket and start working on the issue/service request by referring the knowledge base.
If they are not able to resolve within the stipulated time as said in
service level document that are escalated to my level 2 team.If level2 team is unable to resolve it gets escalted to customer's level3 team.If level 1 and level2 team are able to resolve the issue/service request on time that should be
trackig the ticket through the closure which also includes updation of the knowledge base.

We have one shared mail box.

Major concerns are:
Either team memebers are missing mails and the issues are not getting resolved and escalated.
Team members are not able to manage it by following the incident management process as it takes lot of time to rightly follow the process.
Focussing more on the process is taking the team away from resolving issues/requests.
Some of the team members are really not able to handle multiple issues/service requests.
In some of the cases they are skipping some of the scheduled activities.
In some cases they are working on assumptions and getting escalated.
Team some times misses the the issues in monitoring.
There are so many manual processes in client's system and activities that sometime seems difficult to manage within the time.

Need help,support and advise from the experts to get the project in track and streamline the processes by adopting best practises.

[The Skeptic]

All (or nearly all) service management problems are People problems.

Sounds to me like you need to work on the team:
- motivate - find what's in it for them (celebrate process wins that save effort, explain to them the value of ITIl on their CV...)
- convert a champion or two to the cause - don't try to go it alone
- try to get a few stakeholders to sponsor and support (and fund) your efforts - a steering committee
- communicate, educate and train
- start measuring people - who opens the most?

Get the People right and they can all start fixing the Process.

Most of all you DON'T have a technology problem. Shoot anyone who tries to fix it with tools or webforms or... Remember: technology does not fix process