Benefits of problem management practice in the organisation

In today's IT world, it is clear to almost everyone how beneficial it is for an organisation to have good IT service management.

In this case, within service management, we will focus on showing the benefits that Problem Management can bring to an organisation, whose main objective is to minimise the impact of incidents and eliminate recurring incidents, taking into account the good practices that ITIL4 brings together.

ITIL4 is a set of best practices for service management, which today brings value even in the way we structure our organisation through the use of agile approaches and the creation, delivery and support of digital services. Within the "Service Management Practices", one of the 17 that ITIL4 groups together with the idea of managing operations, we find "Problem Management", closely related to incident management practices, monitoring and event management, the Service Desk practice, among others that make up the heart of the operation.

Problem management makes it possible to minimize the impact of incidents and eliminate recurring incidents, taking into account the best practices that ITIL4 brings together.

Currently, the practice of problem management is based on 4 main processes:

1. Proactive problem identification

​​​​2. Reactive problem identification

​​​​3. Troubleshooting

​​​4. Error control

In practical application, we could summarise the problem management intervention as follows:

• When an incident happens, technical experts in the field will come as soon as possible to resolve the incident (like firefighters come to extinguish a fire).
• When the incident has a bigger impact, either financially or because it has affected many users, etc., once the incident has been resolved, the situation has been normalised or the danger has passed (the fire has been extinguished), we need to know what caused it in order to prevent it from happening again on future occasions.
• This is where the problem management process begins. Subject matter experts will collaborate to try to find the root cause of the incident and an action plan will be developed to prevent the incident from recurring, or to mitigate its impact if this is not entirely possible.
• In parallel, a register of known errors and a Knowledge Management will be created, defining best practices resulting from the analysis of the problems. This will be extremely useful for the teams in dealing with new incidents, taking action much more quickly in the event of future service or production interruptions.

If our organisation has a good problem management process, we will achieve:

• By reducing the number of incidents, we will therefore be able to reduce service or production interruptions and the cost associated with these interruptions.
• If the incident cannot be definitively resolved, the organisation shall be able to remedy the situation as soon as possible, taking into account knowledge management. Reducing the downtime of the service or production will also reduce the associated cost.
• The organisation will be much more attractive to customers by minimising the impact of incidents and their associated cost.
• Productivity will increase, as resources will no longer be needed for incident response and can be used for other purposes.
• The organisation will have a good overview of the state of its equipment, applications etc., which will help it to make decisions (change of infrastructure, upgrades or software changes, etc.).

In summary, some of the benefits that problem management could bring to our organisation would include:

How IZERTIS can help in this problem management process

At IZERTIS, through the Governance area, we define and implement Service Management Offices (Business-BSM and IT-ITSM) from a strategic perspective and focus in order to be able to respond in a timely manner to business demand and guarantee the most efficient and optimised production and delivery of services possible.

One of the processes of this service management would be problem management, in the implementation of which IZERTIS is a company with proven experience on which the organisation can rely.

For more information: IT Governance solutions | Izertis - Izertis