All businesses that rely on information technology (IT) will experience incidents that cause some level of disruption to their operation. Many organisations become expert at dealing with these types of service interruptions and go on to develop extremely competent incident management processes and procedures. Support staff can often be very proud of the speed and the skills they have been able to deploy in restoring services.
Unfortunately, this focus can lead to support organisations concentrating on recovering from incidents, rather than resolving the underlying root causes. This results in recurring incidents that reduce both customer satisfaction and the cost-effectiveness of the support process. By implementing problem management processes at the same time as incident management processes, organizations can identify and resolve the root causes of any significant or recurring incidents, thus reducing the likelihood of recurrence.
In order to achieve this, problem management investigates and analyses the root causes of incidents and commonly initiates changes to internal processes, procedures, or the infrastructure to resolve the underlying problem or provide a temporary workaround.
Key benefits of effective problem management include:
- A reduction in the number and business impact of incidents, problems, and known errors as problem management begins to resolve the root causes of incidents and deploy effective workarounds.
- Improved IT service quality as customers experience fewer repeat incidents.
- Increased cost effectiveness of support resources will occur as steps are taken to reduce the time spent by support teams in repetitive, time consuming, and costly support tasks. Resources can then be focused more efficiently on identifying the causes of incidents.
- Increased knowledge capital (the historic data used to identify trends and proactively identify any problem areas). This should reveal information about individual components within the infrastructure, as well as process or procedural breakdowns, and provide data for future problem analysis.
- Improved organisational learning can take place as accurate recording of problem management data leads to trending and identification of areas that really require attention.
- Increased first-time fix rate at the service desk as workarounds can be deployed to increase the speed of service restoration.
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