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Problem Management. Basic Concepts. Standard Terminology. Incident Management – those processes and activities focused on restoring IT services.
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Problem Management Basic Concepts
Standard Terminology Incident Management – those processes and activities focused on restoring IT services. Problem Management – those processes and activities focused on preventing incidents from occurring with the IT environment by addressing the root cause of those incidents. Root Cause Analysis – the process or processes used to determine the underlying cause or root cause of incident(s) occurring within the IT environment. • Root cause analysis is the primary activity of Problem Management. • If you do not address to the root cause(s) of an incident or series of incidents, the incident is likely to repeat itself because all of the factors that contributed to the incident still exist within the IT environment.
Problem – the unknown underlying root cause of an incident(s). Known-Error – the known underlying root cause of an incident(s). A problem becomes a known-error upon the successful diagnosis or determination of the root cause of an incident(s). What do you do with a known-error? a) Live with the known-error based on an informed decision (e.g. change is too risky to implement, fix is too costly or no fix is currently available) and document the workaround to improve incident management efforts. b) Implement a change to remove the known-error from the IT environment. Problem and Known-Errors
When Does Problem Management Occur? Figure 1 – Problem Management usually occurs following the restoration of service (sequential). Figure 2 – Problem Management and Incident Management can occur at the same time (parallel). Note: while Problem and Incident can run in parallel, it is important to note that the primary goal of each process are usually contradictory.
Observation: most support teams seem to be performing Problem Management informally. By informally, this is to say that the teams are not using a problem record within Assyst to track their progress on removing Problems/Known-Errors from the environment. Opportunity: start having support teams track their success in managing problems within Assyst. Improvement: a Problem template has been created to guide support teams through the stages of Problem Management (complete). Improvement: ITSM Problem Coordinators are reviewing the process documentation to help mature the formal problem management process (underway). Opportunities and Improvements