Problem management

Incidents happen to people

When they are using their IT, and it seems to not be working correctly, they report these incidents to us in ITS. Incidents MAY be caused by problems - or other factors like a lack of training.

Problems happen to infrastructure

A problem is “the unknown cause of an incident or several incidents.” Actually, it is possible that we may discover a problem that is never reported by a user (by event monitoring for example.) When we have diagnosed it and understand its root cause, we can call it a known problem. We can then decide to fix it by changing the infrastructure in some way, to work around it or to live with the problem (in these cases we need to document our findings and decision.) Failure to halt the recurrence of incidents or understand the root cause of incidents leads to lost time, loss of productivity and frustrated users.

Effective problem management halts the recurrence of incidents and has benefits to the individual and the organisation as a whole as it improves availability (up time) and user productivity.

The objective of the Problem Management process is to minimise the adverse impact of incidents and problems on the business that are caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors.