The activities required to respond to service interruptions and to restore service (see Incident Management) have different qualities than those activities required to identify and permanently remove the underlying cause of service interruptions.
Problem management refers to activities undertaken to minimise the adverse impact on the business of problems that are caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors. Problem management gets to the root cause of problems, identifies workarounds or permanent fixes and eliminates errors.
Inevitably a close linkage is required between Incident, Problem, Change, Release and Knowledge Management.
Problem management activities include:
As incidents are logged the RMS Visual Options and search facilities identify trends between incidents that potentially relate to a problem. The Visual Options are icons that light up as related information is found within the system, for example existing calls by customer, asset, location, application etc. If the icon is then clicked on a worklist of the related incidents will be opened.
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As these incidents are identified as related a separate problem folder is raised which captures information specific to problem management process. The problem will also link to related changes which can be created seamlessly as part of the problem management process. This is outlined in the following diagram.
A problem folder is shown below:-
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The bulk worklist facility also provides the ability to work on multiple incidents relating to a problem, for example, updating all customers reporting an incident on the status of the problem. A separate work list could then be set up to monitor the problem records.
A separate problem worklist is used to manage and monitor problems. ITIL advocates having the ability to keep in touch with all the contacts for incidents caused by a problem. By adding the problem reference to the search criteria on a call worklist, we can use the bulk mailing facility to notify all contacts on the progress of incidents.
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Problem Management within RMS provides detailed analysis of the problem as per the processes defined within the ITIL framework. This includes the capture of information relating to the affect, possible causes, problem details and time/cost analysis. The analysis page also allows the facility to define keywords for problem identification through the known error log.
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In the same way that incident and problem linking is seamless, the RMS systems also provide a seamless link between both incident and problem management and change. Changes can be raised from an incident or a problem and the relationship is recorded both ways.
