Predecessors/Before You BeginITIL defines the word "problem" very specifically. Learning about problem management should go hand in hand with learning about incident management. Problem ManagementProblem Management is the process of investigating the underlying causes of incidents. Problem management relies on three key terms: A problem becomes an error when it's understood, and a "known error" when there is also a workaround. What does "understood" mean? One itSMFusion presentation recommended that understood means "when you can no longer ask 'why?'" How is problem management different from incident management? Well, for one the motivations are different. Incident management wants to resolve incidents quickly so users can do their work. Problem management wants to address problems thoroughly so the problems never occurs again. Problem management is also much more time-intensive than incident management. For example, if a user can't read the text on a web site because they are running Netscape 1.0, incident management might be able to resolve the incident by asking the user to use another browser. Problem management, on the other hand, would have to spend a lot of time debugging Netscape 1.0 to fix the issue. For this reason, prioritization is very important in problem management. Problems need to be prioritized, then selectively investigated, and then requests for change raised to change management for the errors to be corrected. University-specific risksSometimes people "just want it fixed" and are not interested in standing up a process to perform investigation. However, University users, due to their background and varied computing environments, may raise widely different incidents, resulting in a large number of potential problems to investigate and an acute need for problem prioritization. Problem investigation should ideally be justified by data showing the cost of the problem not being resolved. However, actual cost vs perceived cost can be difficult to account. Contacts and Resources |
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