Information Technology Templates

Start with the process that fails most often, or costs most when it does. Teams with a busy service desk usually begin with the incident management and IT support templates. Teams preparing for an audit or a cyber insurance renewal usually start with patch management and backup verification, because those are the controls assessors ask for evidence of first. Add the others once the first one runs every month without being chased.

Incident management restores the service as quickly as possible, even with a temporary workaround. The incident postmortem runs afterwards for incidents that meet your triggers: it rebuilds the timeline, finds the contributing factors and tracks the actions agreed in the review. Problem management is the longer investigation into the underlying cause, often across several incidents, and ends with a permanent fix delivered through change management. A postmortem can raise a problem record, and one problem record can outlive many postmortems.

They follow a server through its life. The server setup checklist builds it to your baseline and hands it to operations, and the monitoring and alerting setup checklist makes sure someone is paged when it fails. From then on the server maintenance checklist covers routine care, the patch management checklist covers the monthly patch cycle and the OS upgrade rollout checklist moves it to a new operating system version before the old one loses support. The quarterly capacity planning checklist decides when it needs more resources, or whether it is needed at all. If the workload moves to the cloud instead, the cloud migration checklist takes it there one wave at a time. When the server is no longer needed, the server decommissioning checklist retires it safely, and any physical hardware moves on to the IT asset disposal checklist.

A common pattern is to run the service desk’s own routine every working day with the IT help desk daily checklist, and to hand the pager over at every rotation change with the on-call handover checklist. Once a month, the monthly IT maintenance checklist checks the whole estate and confirms that the server maintenance, patch and restore test runs happened, and the SSL/TLS certificate renewal checklist catches certificates due to expire as maximum lifetimes fall to 200 days and then 100. Each quarter, many teams add a capacity review and an Active Directory and Entra ID account cleanup, and review each major vendor’s position with the software license audit checklist ahead of its true-up or renewal. A quarterly alert review, part of the monitoring and alerting setup checklist, deletes the alerts nobody acts on. Treat these cadences as a starting point and tune them to your risk.

Test restores every month, rotating through systems so each one is restored at least once a year and the most critical ones more often. The backup verification checklist records each measured restore time against its RTO and RPO. Audit disaster recovery readiness at least once a year with the disaster recovery audit checklist. Exercise the business continuity plan through the year, from tabletop walkthroughs to live tests, with the business continuity plan testing checklist, and review the whole programme annually.

Yes. Every template can be edited: add or remove tasks, change due dates, assign steps to people or groups, and add form fields for the evidence you need. Several templates already branch on the environment. The server setup and decommissioning checklists show different tasks for physical, virtual and cloud servers, and the maintenance checklist adds hardware checks only when a group includes physical servers. MSPs can keep a separate copy for each client, with that client’s systems, SLAs and escalation contacts.

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