IT Service Delivery for Small to Medium Size Businesses      |
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Problem ManagementProblem management is an extension of your Incident Management process ( see Service Desk above). Whereas incident management is focused on restoring the user to service as soon as possible, problem management seeks to eliminate the problem from occurring again by finding and fixing the root cause. This process is essential in providing a reliable stable environment. Your Service Desk is a gold mine of information that needs to be tapped. Start by running some weekly reports and reviewing them with staff, look for incidents that keep cropping up, these are your chronic issues. Ask your staff to come up with ways to eliminate these issues, in many cases you may need to upgrade equipment, add memory, or perform some other remedy that requires funding, your cost justification is built into the lost production time built into your Service Desk tickets. For other areas you might find that a process wasn't followed, for example change management wasn't performed and an unauthorized change created a problem. Be critical of yourself, and view this exercise as a chance to improve. I encourage the use of an RFO (reason for outage) form for any event that causes significant loss of productivity, this form documents the event by recording the time of occurrence, the length of duration, the sequence of events in the resolution, and any breakdowns of hardware, software, or process that led to the event. It will also have a section to describe what could be done to eliminate the downtime or at least minimize the impact.
Problem Management will move you from fire fighting to proactive management of your organization. Check here again there will be more to follow. |
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