Problem Management overview
The mission of the problem management process is to minimize the number of incidents. Problem Management can proactively prevent the occurrence of incidents, errors, and additional problems. Problem Management supports this goal by managing the following:
- Problem investigations—An important ITIL objective is investigating and resolving problems in a continuing effort to cut costs and improve services. A problem investigation helps an IT organization get to the root cause of incidents. The investigation initiates actions that help to improve or correct the situation, preventing the incident from recurring. For example, if computers are running low on disk space, ideally the problem can be resolved before it becomes an incident.
Problem investigations are usually triggered by an incident review or by an application such as TrueSight Infrastructure Management. For example, TrueSight Infrastructure Management can generate an event about a capacity threshold being reached. This might cause the problem coordinator to create a problem investigation to prevent a capacity shortage from causing outages.
After a problem investigation identifies the cause, this information can result in a known error, which describes the root cause and the proposed structural solution to remove the root cause.
- Known errors—A known error is a problem that has been successfully diagnosed and for which a permanent solution has been proposed. After the root cause analysis of a problem investigation is completed and a structural solution has been proposed, a known error is created to request that the proposed solution is implemented. The implementation of the proposed solution is part of the change management process. A known error process can have one of the following results:
- A change request to implement the needed fix
- Closing the known error as an accepted issue, with updates to the knowledge database containing steps to avoid the issue
Business value
BMC Helix ITSM: Service Desk acts as a single point of contact for user requests, user-submitted incidents, and infrastructure-generated incidents. Problem Management focuses on determining the root cause of a problem, and on using the BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management processes to correct the root cause.
The following graphic shows the relationship between Incident Management, Problem Management, and Change Management processes for user requests.
End-to-end process
The following figure describes the problem management lifecycle. The problem management process consists of the following procedures:
- Problem coordinators review incident requests to identify problems within the services they are responsible for.
- Specialists conduct root cause analysis when they analyze a problem.
- Problem coordinators perform an analysis review when they review the results of a root cause analysis.
- Problem coordinators close out problems.
Watch the following video (8:25) to learn about the basic flow of the Problem Management process.
How the Process Flow Status area displays the process flow
The Process Flow Status area displays the flow of the problem investigation within the Problem Investigation form. A diagram shows the stages of a problem investigation in blue. The current stage of the investigation is highlighted in green. The status of the investigation is indicated both by color and text.
