This document defines a generic incident management process and supporting documentation that can be used to implement incident management and to manage incidents within most organizations, projects or operations activities for a system, service, software, or product. This document also provides supporting diagrams describing the process and example documents.

This document is applicable to incident management in all life cycle models (e.g. incremental, waterfall, evolutionary, agile). This document covers incidents identified across the life cycle, including those that arise during both development (e.g. defects) and operation (e.g. those handled by service management).