ITIL Problem Management

ITIL Solutions: ITIL Based Service Management

The following overview describes the fundamentals of ITIL Problem Management. Also read how infraEnterprise supports Problem Management.

Problem Management investigates the underlying cause of incidents, and aims to prevent incidents of a similar nature from recurring. By removing errors, which often requires a structural change to the IT infrastructure in an organization, the number of incidents can be reduced over time.

Within IT service management, a distinction is made to identify each area of the incident lifecycle, namely:

Incident – a fault or disruption which affects the normal operation of an IT service.
Problem – a state, identified from incidents, that indicates an error in the IT infrastructure. A Problem remains in this state until a cause is found.
Known Error – a Problem for which the cause is found and is often related to a fault with a configuration item (CI) or a number of CIs within the IT infrastructure.

The difference between Incident Management and Problem Management

The main difference between Incident Management and Problem Management is that the former deals with fighting symptoms to incidents, while the latter seeks to remove the causes of incidents permanently from the IT infrastructure.

In Incident Management, interaction with customers is usually reactive, with the main objective being to find a workaround solution to restore normal services for the customer as soon as possible.

In Problem Management, IT support staff are more proactive as they dedicate resources to establishing the underlying causes of incidents. There is usually little or no interaction with the customers, as this is left to the responsibility of the Service Desk.

The relationship of Problem Management to other ITIL processes

ITIL Incident Management

Problem Management assists Incident Management by:

providing feedback to the incident owner on resolution and progress of the incident
assisting in determining priority in addressing outstanding incidents
indicating changes necessary to permanently fix Known Errors.

ITIL Configuration Management

Problem Management assists Configuration Management by:

providing details on Known Errors and related CIs, their criticality, relationships and dependencies
supplying historical data for trend analysis and progress monitoring
providing information on external suppliers, contractors and vendors.

ITIL Change Management

Problem Management assists Change Management by:

providing input into the change management process through the formal issuing of Requests for Change (RFC).

ITIL Service Level Management

Problem Management assists Service Level Management by:

providing service response times to problem and error resolution
linking to Service Level Management through threshold agreements and notifying the Service Desk when escalations and thresholds have been breached.