Incident & Problem – do we really need both?

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The increasing business need for sophisticated IT solutions means that many systems have become very complex. This is leading to a growth in the number of IT relate issues / incident / problems where it is difficult to identify the actual cause. Investigation of such issues is often haphazard and progress towards a full resolution is slow.

The business demand is for “quick fixes” so we can get back to work.  In most situations they are even prepared to accept the potential for the issue to reoccur as long as they can get back to work – rapid restoration of service.  What is the reaction when the same issue does reoccur and there is the same negative impact? Typically “Why did you not fix it properly?” – “Well you wanted to get back to work” – and so the finger pointing and recriminations go on.

If we look at the basic underlying concepts of Incident Management and Problem Management they are both the same – find the cause, find a solution, apply the solution. What is the big differentiator? Simple really its “What we do to prevent the same issue for the same reasons.” If the issue comes back but for a different reason then we did not resolve it in the first place.  If we can nail that then we will be moving forward.

Some years ago working with a global engineering firm it was interesting to see that they had taken the decision not to use Problem Management as described in Best Practice. Rather they expanded the Incident Management process to include root cause analysis (after all you cannot resolve an incident until you know what has broken). They then created a group called “Case Management”. This group came together as a result of major outages, disaster recovery situations, repeated failures etc. Their job was to find out what had occurred, why and what needed to be done to prevent the same thing happening again for the same reason. The group had accountability and empowerment to introduce resolution, change or indeed anything they believed necessary to prevent the issue coming back. Problem Management as described in best practice was used as a foundation but the application of the concepts was innovative.

So we ask the question “Is Problem Management, as described in best practice, required if we can expand the remit of Incident Management?” Let’s not forget best practice is evolutionary so let’s evolve.

I will be presenting a seminar on 9^th June at 3.30 pm on this subject at SITS16 – The Service Desk & IT Support show running at Olympia in London.