It's recommended that certain things need to be in place before setting up the Incident and Problem Management processes. These are:
Clear definition of service requests and incidents: The process and all functions should be clear about what constitutes as a service request and what incidents are. The definitions should be agreed upon before proceeding to the next steps.
Escalation paths: Functional and hierarchical escalation paths must be defined.
Categories: A comprehensive list of categories should be identified and listed for the incidents to be classified into. The categorization proves to be very useful at later stages in identifying the areas of improvement and establishing trends during Problem Management.
RACI: Responsibilities and accountability of teams and people should be clearly stated. Similarly, the list of teams or people to be consulted and/or informed for certain events should be stated.
Configuration Management...