Identifying problems proactively
This use case describes how problem coordinators can identify frequently recurring incidents and improve Service Desk efficiency by preventing these incidents from recurring in the future.
Scenario
Colin is the Problem Coordinator at Invention Inc., where one of his core tasks is to review incident trends in order to identify proactively underlying problems which have not yet been logged and brought under management. For this task, Colin usually obtains detailed incident reports periodically in Excel spreadsheets and manually categorizes incidents that are similar to analyze the trends. This process is not only cumbersome, but is also error-prone and he has to invest a lot of time in analysis.
Colin uses the Proactive problem Management workspace to analyze the closed and resolved incidents. He creates recurrent and one time jobs to generate incident clusters. He uses service for first level grouping and then uses the machine learning algorithms to create clusters for each service.
From the dashboard, he is then able to analyze the clusters that generate significant amount of work for the Service Desk. For a service for which there are significant number of incidents, he creates a problem investigation to perform the root cause analysis. After creating a problem, Colin assigns the problem to a specialist to identify the root cause and propose a solution.
Workflow
The following table describes the tasks to be performed in the process of identifying problems proactively
User | Action | Reference |
|---|---|---|
Problem coordinator | Configure the recurrent job settings to analyze portion of incidents of interest | |
Problem coordinator | Configure the one time job settings to analyze portion of incidents of interest | |
Problem coordinator | Work with clusters in the Proactive problem management dashboard | |
Tenant administrator | Specify the language that will be used for processing incident data and stop words |
Results
Using the Proactive problem management workspace, Colin is now able to identify frequently recurring incidents easily. Using this actionable insight, Colin can identify the clusters that generate the most work for Service Desk and initiate the process of problem investigation. Colin can assign the root cause analysis to a specialist and can work towards preventing these incidents from reoccurring in the future.
Benefits
- Reduced effort for incident analysis and problem creation
- Improved identification of incident clusters
- Faster reduction of incidents in Service Desk
- Better alignment around focus areas through data-driven decisions and good visualization
Where to go from here