Key takeaways
- IT incidents are unexpected disruptions or reduced quality in IT services.
- IT problems are the underlying causes that may give rise to several incidents.
- Efficient problem management identifies and resolves larger IT issues, reducing incidents caused by them.
- Workarounds can be used to reduce the impact of incidents or problems before they can be fully resolved, helping to maintain service and uptime while working on a permanent solution.
- While ITIL problem management can significantly reduce incidents in many cases, it cannot prevent or fix all incidents. That’s why problem management and incident management should work side by side.
- Proactive problem management is a key part of overall problem management. Incident records are analysed to identify potential problems or trends that may lead to problems. This enables IT teams to reduce the impact of problems before they occur.
- The IT Care Center platform integrates problem and incident management to provide a more proactive and comprehensive solution for IT incidents in an organization.
For IT agents, incidents are a fact of life.
Around 20% of organizations have more than 20 IT incidents per day. At the same time, 70% of businesses get 100 or more ‘warnings’ every day about dangers that could lead to potential incidents.
As the saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Whenever possible, it is better to prevent incidents before they strike rather than fix incidents after they occur.
Of course, many incidents can’t be predicted or prevented. But many can. That’s where problem management comes into the picture.
How are “problems” and “incidents” related to one another?
In the ITIL framework for IT service management, problems and incidents are separate concepts but closely related.
An incident is an unplanned disruption to an IT service or a reduction in the quality of an IT service. For example, if a user’s email service is down, the IT agent must resolve the incident quickly to restore service. This is “incident management”.
A problem is the underlying cause of an incident or several incidents. The cause is usually unknown at the time. A problem record is created, and the problem management process begins.
Problem management entails identifying and resolving the root cause, ensuring that future incidents are prevented. For example, if an email service outage occurred because of a server misconfiguration, then correct reconfiguration would solve the problem that caused the incident.
A single problem often gives rise to multiple incidents. For example, a failing server might cause various services to go offline for multiple users. When similar incidents occur, it should trigger a problem investigation or root cause analysis to uncover whether a larger underlying issue is to blame.
Seen this way, it is clear that efficient problem management will go a long way to reducing the number of incidents.
How ITIL problem management affects incident rates?
Frequent or severe incidents can indicate the need for a problem investigation. For example, if users repeatedly say that website performance is low, the root cause may be inadequate server resources. In this case, increasing server capacity could solve the problem completely or relieve it to a certain degree. Once the problem is solved, it may even highlight other problems that were masked by the server capacity issue. This helps to reduce the incident rate even further.
Workarounds: Maximizing service while solving problems
A key aspect of problem management is to provide workarounds to incident teams to restore service while the root cause is addressed. Workarounds reduce or can even eliminate the impact of an incident or problem for which a full resolution is not yet available. For instance, restarting a failed configuration item could be a suitable workaround.
Workarounds are documented in “known error” records. A known error is a problem that has a documented root cause and a workaround. Problem management handles known errors throughout their lifecycle. Workarounds for incidents that do not have associated problem records are documented in the incident record.
Workarounds enable organizations to stay productive with minimal downtime, even when problems take a lot of time to resolve.
Proactive problem management: a step ahead
Proactive problem management is a process that identifies problems that might otherwise be missed, enabling IT teams to mitigate problems before they occur or escalate.
Proactive problem management analyzes incident records and uses data collected by other IT service management processes to identify trends or significant problems.
Incident management is key to enabling a proactive approach to problem management, providing invaluable data for root cause analysis of problems. Incident logs, error reports, and user feedback collected in incident management and response are critical to predicting and diagnosing problems and pinpointing the underlying cause of failure.
So, does problem management reduce incidents?
Bottom line: problem management does reduce incidents – not in all cases, but in many. To maximize the prevention and resolution of incidents, however, it is important to integrate problem management and incident management in responsive workflows. Problems and incidents are mutually related, and therefore, a streamlined and proactive approach will deliver the best results.
Reduce incidents with ITCC’s integrated approach
IT Care Center features all ITSM modules in one agile, low-code platform, including incident management and problem management, that are expertly integrated to ensure proactive problem management and streamlined reduction of incidents.
With ITCC, IT teams can identify which incidents are related to a specific problem and receive instant updates about a problem, including up-to-date statuses and available workarounds or solutions. ITCC’s problem management capabilities support in-depth root cause analyses based on comprehensive data, highly effective in reducing recurring incidents and minimizing the overall incident rate.
Looking to reduce incidents with an integrated approach to problem management and incident management? Talk to ITCC today.
