---
title: Major incident workbench
description: The major incident workbench is a single pane view designed for major incident managers, communication managers, and resolver groups. The workbench helps to manage major incidents by aggregating and providing actionable information.
locale: en-US
canonical_url: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/major-incident-workbench.html
release: australia
product: Incident Management
classification: incident-management
topic_type: concept
last_updated: "2025-01-30"
reading_time_minutes: 2
breadcrumb: [Managing major incidents, Incident Management, IT Service Management]
---

# Major incident workbench

The major incident workbench is a single pane view designed for major incident managers, communication managers, and resolver groups. The workbench helps to manage major incidents by aggregating and providing actionable information.

To navigate to the major incident workbench, open a major incident or a major incident candidate, and select **View Workbench** on the form header.

\[Omitted image "major-incident-workbench.png"\] Alt text: major-incident-workbench

**Note:** Groups and number of members involved in the groups widget are populated from the **Assignment group** and the **Assigned to** fields of incident, incident communication plan, incident task, as well as the members involved in an active conference call.

## Header components

-   From the workbench, to navigate back to the incident form, select **View Form** that appears on the header of the workbench.
-   If an incident is not yet in the **Resolved** state, then the header displays the **Resolve** button. To resolve an incident, select **Resolve**.
-   When an incident is not yet accepted as a major incident, then the workbench displays a choice list on the header. The list displays options to promote the incident to a major incident or to reject the incident.
-   Use the chat icon \(\[Omitted image "MIM-chat.png"\] Alt text: Open record chat\) on the sidebar discussions to initiate a chat on the incident level. The chat is a record feed — whatever you write in the chat appears in the activity stream. For more information, see [Collaboration in Service Operations Workspace](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/service-operations-workspace/collaboration-sow.md).
-   You can select \[Omitted image "edit-icon.png"\] Alt text: edit icon to change the state of the incident.
-   Duration is an active timer that tracks the time since the creation of the incident. The timer stops when the incident is resolved.

-   **[Major incident workbench UI elements](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/mi-workbench-ui-elements.md)**  
The major incident workbench provides UI elements which display the summary of tasks, progress of communication plan, conferencing information, and a report on the cause and resolution of the major incident.
-   **[Associate a new post incident report](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/asso-new-post-incident-report.md)**  
Create your own post incident report and associate the UI page with the **View Complete Report** button under the **Post Incident Report** tab. Using the customized report, you can add information that is specific to your organization.
-   **[Add communication plan in the workbench](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/add-comm-plan-from-mim-workbench.md)**  
You can create a new communication plan or add a new communication task to an existing communication plan from the workbench. This UI action is helpful when you do not have an existing well-defined communication plan in the system.
-   **[Add similar incidents from major incident workbench](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/add-similar-inci-mim-workbench.md)**  
Add similar incidents to a major incident so that the support teams can work on the parent record for a coordinated response process.
-   **[Access on-call escalation path from major incident workbench](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/access-escalation-path.md)**  
Access on-call roster and escalation details from major incident workbench to reach out to a support group.

**Parent Topic:**[Managing major incidents](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/incident-management/major-incident-management.md)

**Related topics**  


[Collaboration in Service Operations Workspace](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/it-service-management/service-operations-workspace/collaboration-sow.md)