The purpose of the Problem Management process is to resolve problems affecting the IT service, both reactively and proactively. Problem Management finds trends in incidents, groups those incidents into problems, identifies the root causes of problems, and initiates change requests (RFCs) against those problems.

Read the Problem Management Key Concepts.

Important links

• Problem Management Tool Mentors
• Tivoli® Open Process Automation Library Extensions for Problem Management
• Implementing IBM Tivoli Service Desk

Outcomes

As a result of the successful implementation of this process:

• The number and adverse impact of incidents and problems is minimized
• Potential incidents are prevented
• Recurrence of incidents is prevented
• The management of incidents is more effective and efficient
• The productivity of support staff is improved
  • For example, by improving Service Desk first time fix rate

An effective problem management process maximizes system availability, improves service levels, reduces costs, and improves customer convenience and satisfaction.

Scope

The process is primarily concerned with establishing the root cause of an incident and its subsequent resolution and prevention. The reactive function is to solve problems relating to one or more incidents. The proactive function is to identify and solve problems before incidents occur.

Effective problem management requires the identification and classification of problems, root cause analysis and resolution of problems. The problem management process also includes the formulation of recommendations for improvement, maintenance of problem records and review of the status of corrective actions.

Includes

• Root cause analysis and identification
• Solution (and workaround) definition and selection
• Submission of change requests (RFCs)
• Appropriate prioritization of resources required for resolution based on business need
• Contribution to the collective problem resolution knowledge base

Excludes

• Identification, creation and resolution of incidents (Incident Management)
• Actual implementation of the resolution of a problem. Problem Management initiates their resolution through Change Management and participates in the Post Implementation Review (PIR)
• Knowledge management methodology (Knowledge Management)

Key performance indicators

• Number of known problems eliminated
• Status of change requests created to eliminate known problems
• Historical number of incidents eliminated through problem elimination
• Number of known errors (with workarounds) added to the known error database
• Trend in number of incidents opened and closed
• Percent of incidents related to known problems
• Percent of incidents that are the result of known errors
• The elapsed time and direct costs
  • In this process domain
  • In each process step and between steps

Relation to other processes

• To resolve the root cause of an error, Problem Management typically generates a request for change, which is processed by Change Management.
• Resolutions of problems may be deployed using Release Management and Deployment Management.
• Information provided by Configuration Management is used to resolve problems and identify other CIs that may need replacement or other action. 
• Incident Management generates incident records that are used to identify incident trends and groups of related incidents.
• Service Execution and Event Management provide information about how services have performed to help Problem Management determine how to proactively resolve problems and errors before they occur.
• Problem Management often resolves problems before they become major outages that must be addressed by IT Service Continuity Management.
• The proper resolution of problems affects service levels, which are managed by Service Level Management.  

Further reading

For more information, see Problem Management in the ITIL® documentation. 

In addition, see the IBM Service Management Web page.