Problem management is a methodical approach to identify the cause of an incident and manage the life cycle of all problems. Reactive management deals with incidents that are currently affecting users, whereas proactive problem management addresses issues that could potentially surface as incidents in the future should they be left alone. A sound problem management process has the potential to significantly reduce the influx of incident tickets, saving IT service desk staff significant time and effort.
This advantage ripples into other benefits such as reduction in mean time to repair MTTR , higher customer satisfaction, a robust known error database, and reduced cost of IT services and issues. Moreover, an organization that practices proactive problem management is likely to find tremendous value from identifying and eliminating issues before they disrupt business processes. Before going further, the following definitions will be useful in understanding the context of this guide.
In this guide, we'll examine each facet of problem management in detail, providing all the knowledge you need to get up to speed on how to implement problem management in your enterprise.
There are a few hurdles organizations might encounter in the process of establishing problem management. The organization might not have the resources to allocate for a problem management team, or it may already have an unorthodox way of managing problems and is reluctant to change.
Sometimes, it could just be a cost-related denial of request. Consequently, it's vital to include all stakeholders in the problem management process, and express how it provides value to different facets of the organization. These benefits include:. The roles of a problem management team are directly related to the organizational structure that is present.
The organization's age, culture, technology, and number of locations worldwide affect the composition of its problem management team. In the case of small IT organizations, the team's responsibilities might all be combined, or in the case of large, multinational corporations, they may be specialized. Being aware of the organization's general strategy is a good starting point to initiate the team formation. Also, it's important to be wary of the resources the organization is ready to expel for the development of a problem management team.
The team's roles and responsibilities should extend, diverge, and mature as the organization's technology grows, otherwise confusions in accountability can arise during service delivery. Just like an organization creates value for its customers, IT service management creates value for its users through best practices, and indirectly aids in creating value for the organization. To create this value, there must be a process with defined inputs and outputs.
The problem identification phase identifies and records problems in a management tool. A service desk tool associated with multiple practices of service management, including incident management, asset management, the CMDB , and change management, gives organizations an advantage in this phase. Hopefully you found it helpful.
If you want to read more from me, and few of my friends, on problem management, then please look at:. Native New Yorker. Loves everything IT-related and hugs. Passionate blogger and Twitter addict. Want a cookie? No, literally. To help you now though, I have some practical tips that you can use while you wait. Setting up Problem Management can seem like another job to add to your already packed list.
Here are 5 Problem Management best practices to help you along. It will be step-by-step based, so for some more over-arching best practices to keep in mind while implementing better Problem Management you can read my other Problem Management blog. When does a problem become an incident? So what do you do? Proactive problem management is the way to go. Inspire others - Share this blog. Problem management prevents you from mindlessly fixing issues as they occur, because it makes you look for the underlying problem that causes these issues to occur in the first place.
Service request management is the practice of processing a request from a user for something to be provided, such as access to applications, software enhancements, and information. It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish a service request from an incident.
By codifying best practices around problem analysis, teams will be able to more quickly respond and take action during the next service disruption. Avoiding incidents will save time, money, and lots of pain. For some web-based services, that number can be dramatically higher. Stop responding to incidents so frequently and return resources and time to teams who could be shipping new value to customers.
When organizations effectively practice problem management, teams continually investigate, learn from incidents, and ship valuable updates. Unfortunately, many enterprises create a siloed problem management team that is too far removed from day-to-day operations to eliminate the most pressing problems.
Problem management prevents incidents and also delivers value. For instance, fixing an incident causing low level performance also ships valuable service quality improvements.
Better problem management leads to fewer incidents, and happier customers. Alternatively, customer patience wears thin when they notice the same incident happening multiple times.
Decreasing the occurrence of repeat incidents builds customer trust. At Atlassian, we advocate bringing the problem and incident management processes closer together. When problem management is a heavy, siloed, and separate process, companies can end up creating a dumping ground of problems.
This backlog is where problem issues go to die in some teams. Such as:. Setting problem management as a separate practice creates a challenge where the problem team becomes a bottleneck or focuses on the wrong things, like problems from external vendors that they have no control over. Root causes are often not investigated until long after the incident has happened.
In many cases, your team may benefit from integrating incident management and problem management practices. This is a proactive approach that allows you to understand what led to the incident at the same time you work to resolve it. For example, resolving an incident in software requires identifying poor code the cause , and then developing replacement code to avoid further incidents the fix.
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