For those that are unaware, the purpose of problem
management is the reduction of incidents in amount and severity that
impact a business. It should not be a place for incidents to rot in search of a root cause. Problem management should help to drive service management
from a reactive to a more proactive place. This statement would suggest that any team
which is experiencing incidents should also logically have some level of problem
management, right?
Whether formalized or not, the trouble is some
organizations are not looking at problem management in a context of business
value. Instead they view problem from an IT or worse yet an incident
management perspective. You might be saying to yourself "of course that's how we view it, problems are the result of incidents which impact IT", and that I may have lost my mind. Simply because we have done something from a certain perspective in the past doesnt mean we can't look at it from another perspective now.
By sticking with the same viewpoint on problems, we may be inadvertently focussing our efforts on issues
which have no solution, root cause and may be low on the priority scale when
it comes to business impact. While it’s good that they are looking at
these issue at all, they have low value in terms of what really
matters to our business.
The reason that problem might be getting a raw deal in
your ability to produce results is that when we focus on these low impact
issues, the urgency and in turn ability
to assign resourcing of any kind to resolve this issue also remains low. The
result is that when we talk about what problem management is doing to improve
service delivery it looks relatively low, leaving those in leadership to ask
what value it brings to the table at all.
The first thing we as practitioners need to do is stop
thinking like IT. Not all incidents are going to require a technical
resolution. Take a closer look at the top escalations to the service desk and
see what drives them in the first place. Here is an example of some typical
escalations:
-
Application errors
- Password resets
- Questions
- Hardware failure
- Network issues
While some of these are still technical in nature, some
things such as questions and password resets are everyday common place in some
organizations. While your company may
not have this issue to deal with there are still may that come into work on a Monday
morning faced with the repetitive task of addressing the forgotten password. This
costly use of resources could be resolved with an automated reset tool of some
sort. The problem analysis would support the cost benefit to implementing a
tool or the effort to automate this activity versus your service desk resources
spending their valuable time to reset a password.
Another heavy hitter is the area of questions. This is
where a knowledge repository of some type could reduce the calls for people who
are asking how to map a network drive over and over again. People want to be
able to search and execute a simple fix for themselves if given the
opportunity. They are already .accustomed to searching online to solve small
issues or address questions that they may have. Just make sure that the place
where people go to consume your knowledge records provide some metrics so that
you can quantify what people are looking up and using.
What you need to keep in mind is that while we will get
problems that have low impact we also need to proactively look to address
larger issues which are impacting our business. Find that balance and you can
improve the value of problem management.
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Labels: Incident Management, ITIL, ITSM, Problem Management