Problem Management

Talk IT - and everyone knows of the Service Desk or Help Desk (Incident Management), but very little focus is on Problem Management.  Why is that? 

Problem Management: I say that  you diagnose root causes of incidents reported by the service desk; then, you arrange changes in the IT infrastructure to prevent their recurrence. Make sense?

 

Problem Management includes the activities required to diagnose the root cause of Incident Management and to determine the resolution to those problems. It is also responsible for ensuring that the resolution is implemented through the appropriate control procedures, especially Change Management and Release Management.  This means it is more than just documenting the root cause, but requires action items.

Problem Management will also maintain information about problems and the appropriate workarounds and resolutions, so that the organization is able to reduce the number and impact of Incident Management over time. In this respect, Problem Management has a strong interface with Knowledge Management, and tools such as the Known Error Database will be used for both. Although Incident Management and Problem Management are separate processes, they are closely related and will typically use the same tools, and may use similar categorization, impact and priority coding systems. This will ensure effective communication when dealing with related incidents and problems.

As a IT Leader, I wanted to make sure that we found the root cause of an impact incident, tell me what the technology, process, people issues are.  Root cause analysis is not just process, but it also points out technology failure, architecture design issues, and process break down.  The problem management analysis has to take all these into account when reporting out the root cause.    One more thing - have a dedicated staff person responsbile for Problem Management.

A couple of frustrating aspects of problem management - paralysis by analysis and spending hours on deep dive into a what I would call above the bar issues.  I always remind folks that some problems or root cause don't need to take a significant effort - at times you can spend to much time, and you loose the value of the process.  Be careful - keep it in perspective.

Ask the why, and ask the why did it happened again, and go till you get to a reasonable view of the process, people, technology.  Fix that which you can and move on. 

There is some great training out there from the ITIL vendors on problem management.  Online courses - a good option.

Keep it positive!

Scott Arnett
scott.arnett@charter.net