Every business relies on software to carry out some operations, and an IT service desk's main task is ensuring that the software works correctly and quickly. But not all service desk teams successfully handle this job, so fixing incidents and their consequences take most of their time. Should this be the case? No. Could you proactively fix issues and prevent numerous problems from interrupting business operations? Yes, by applying effective IT problem management.
If you’re wondering what problem management is, read on. We'll define it, explain the problem management process, and discuss how it benefits a business’s bottom line. Let's start with defining problem management and its place in IT issues lifecycle management.
What Is Problem Management, and Why Is It Important for Your Business?
To explain what problem management is, we’ll use the definition of “problem” from the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) — one of the most common frameworks for IT service management (ITSM).
The significance of problem management is easy to understand in the context of its relationship to other ITIL processes, such as incident, change, knowledge, and service request management. And the best way to show this relationship is by using examples.
Problem management and incident management
IT problem management focuses on an incident’s underlying cause and preventing them from reoccurring and provoking more incidents. Incident management is applied to fix one particular incident and its harmful consequences.
For example, a slow payment system is an incident. The problem is whatever causes the incident. You can address the incident by contacting your payment integration provider or you can work around it by using another payment system.
But you must determine what caused the system to slow down i.e. find the problem (whether it was connectivity issues, bugs of the integration, etc.) to make sure there no future incidents occur. If another incident occurs, the provider itself may be the problem and you may need to solve it by replacing the current payment vendor with a better one.
Problem management and change management
IT problem management deals with identifying and fixing IT-related problems. Change management happens when a problem can't be fixed easily, and the company needs significant changes to overcome it. To introduce these changes smoothly, you should implement change management practices.
For example, let’s say an incident occurs in which employees complain about slow software, and you investigate the problem. You find that the software isn't just buggy — the problem is that the software is outdated, insufficient, and no longer supported by the manufacturer. In this case, you should define your needs, choose and buy new suitable software, and train employees on how to use it.
Problem management and knowledge management
In the context of problem management, knowledge management as an ITIL process means collecting, sorting, tagging, storing, updating, and using information about IT problems and incidents. This information is usually stored in the knowledge base or Known Error Database (KEDB).
As a result, knowledge management streamlines problem management.
Problem management and service request management
Service request management is like a third cousin of IT problem management — they're related, but often very distantly. Service requests aren't always prompted by technical issues. For example, you’ll always have employees who forget their passwords and request a password restore or reset. You can’t eliminate these incidents because can’t fix the root cause, which is employees not remembering passwords. But the IT service department can proactively reduce service requests by providing a self-service option, like using chatbots to automate response actions.
Service requests have value, in that they become data sources for timely problem detection and resolution. For instance, service requests from several employees informed you that they were assigned tasks outside their expertise. You should check workflows and routing to fix the problem. Otherwise, employees will waste time redirecting tasks or even start ignoring them. Thus, the service request helped you discover a problem and remedy it in a timely manner.
These examples show why every ITSM process functions like the parts of a finely tuned engine — they're all interconnected. Or using a different analogy, If ITSM were a pyramid, IT problem management would be its base; only by detecting and containing root problems do you avoid the harmful effects that stack up on the base.
Benefits of ITIL Problem Management
Effective IT problem management brings businesses multiple benefits — the fewer disruptive incidents occur, the fewer anxiety-producing, time-wasting, and money-draining situations companies will have to address. Let’s take a look at these benefits.
Ongoing service improvement
Proactive problem management has a cumulative effect — as you establish and document procedures to prevent harmful incidents, you can provide more efficient service going forward. Ongoing service improvements mean your team and their customers have better experiences.
Reduced spending
Outage incidents causing at least $100,000 in total losses jumped from 39% in 2019 to 60% in 2022. Imagine how much money a business wastes on incident management when other IT-related incidents occur if their causes weren’t detected and contained in time. But proper problem management can prevent these incidents, saving your company money.
Higher productivity
Your IT service team can spend hours and weeks fixing incidents like security breaches and data losses. But if you prevent the incidents before they occur, they have time for productive work on vital projects.
Continuous learning
By studying problems, their causes, and their solutions, a company accumulates knowledge. This knowledge, properly documented and consulted when similar problems arise, helps you improve the problem management process.
Reduced resolution times and minimal service interruptions
Not every incident can be prevented. Even companies with effective problem management can’t predict everything. Still, by incorporating problem management practices, your IT service team can detect root causes faster, possibly find solutions by analogy with previous problems, and reduce downtime.
Happier employees and customers
Fewer problems mean better service and happier customers. Employees are also happier when they aren’t yelled at by customers for poor service and by managers for poor performance when a system crash just keeps them from doing a better job.
Only organizations that have an effective problem management process in place can derive these benefits. Read on to join them.
Problem Management Process
Though the problem management process might unfold very differently from case to case, it essentially has a standard sequence of steps.
Step 1: Detect the problem proactively or reactively
We might sound like Captain Obvious, but to manage a problem, you need to detect the cause. And you can do it one of two ways — proactively and reactively.
The proactive approach involves the following measures:
- establish monitoring systems
- define performance baselines so you can identify deviations or anomalies
- implement automated alerts for emerging incidents
- conduct regular log analysis
- use predictive analytics
Automation makes proactive problem detection more efficient, but your software might lack some of the features necessary to support it, such as predictive analytics. In this case, you can change your service desk to an advanced one and migrate data with Help Desk Migration.
Still, you can’t predict everything, sometimes you have to react after a problem has already caused an incident.
The reactive approach requires checking or fixing the following:
- user reports and observation of symptoms
- logs and error messages
- configuration settings
- network connectivity
- recent changes or updates
- security vulnerabilities
Look for any recent changes or anomalies to pinpoint the problem.
Step 2: Log the problem
Aside from documenting all relevant details, problem logging involves:
- Categorizing, which refers to sorting and grouping problems according to the type of process disrupted, like data backup, service availability, or performance issues. This allows your IT service team to quickly search a knowledge base for similar, previously resolved problems, and find solutions for a new incident.
- Prioritizing, which involves determining the relative significance and urgency of a problem. This ensures that the team attends to the most pressing problems before less pressing ones.
Step 3: Investigate and diagnose
Uncover the problem's cause by first checking logs and checking your KEDB to find similar problems.
If you don’t find a solution or you need to modify the solution you find, use all problem investigation methods available to you. For example, you can apply the "five whys technique" by asking why the problem occurred until you get to the cause, or you can try to recreate the problem and examine related logs and metrics.
Step 4: Resolve the problem or create a workaround
If you find the problem cause, your next step is to eliminate it if you can.
But if you don’t have a permanent solution or you can't implement a solution immediately due to a lack of resources, you can create a workaround to limit the problem’s impact. For example, if the problem is that the company uses a legacy system, you can offer a temporary workaround with several low-cost integrations to improve system performance, because implementing a permanent solution — a new more advanced system — needs time and money you don’t have.
Step 5: Add new data to the knowledge base
Enter all findings into your KEDB and use them for future problem management cases.
Step 6: Close the problem and review the process
When the problem is resolved, you should review its management process and determine if you could have done anything better, like perhaps involving more people in the investigation or solution. This way, the next time a similar problem occurs, you’ll be ready to solve it more efficiently.
Following this process ensures that your IT service desk team continuously improves their problem management procedures and prevents issues that disrupt the company's work.
Conclusion
IT incidents often mean financial losses and decreased service quality, but with effective IT problem management, future incidents can be averted or managed with minimal harm to the business.
Problem management is a crucial part of IT service that you can’t neglect if you want to ensure that your IT-related operations run smoothly. The take-home message is that you should implement the problem management process daily, continuously improve it, and use automated problem management tools to get better performance with less effort.
