{"id":4647,"date":"2013-08-05T00:39:49","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T00:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multiacademstg.wpengine.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2013\/08\/05\/itil-problem-management-getting-rid-problems\/"},"modified":"2025-05-27T15:44:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T15:44:12","slug":"itil-problem-management-getting-rid-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2013\/08\/05\/itil-problem-management-getting-rid-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"ITIL Problem Management: getting rid of problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Albert Einstein: \u201cYou can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Problem Management (PM) is one of the oldest processes in ITIL<\/a>, and one of the processes implementers have a lot of problems with (notice the pun?). It was significantly rewritten in the 2011 edition, in spite of its age.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Problem vs. Incident Management<\/h2>\n

I am used to explaining this quite a lot to new people in ITIL. It comes naturally to a person outside of the IT Service Management world to say \u201cProblem,\u201d when they have an incident. Remember \u201cHouston, we have a problem\u201d? Even one of the major Service Desk tool vendors keeps the Incident database under internal name \u201cProblem,\u201d due to legacy reasons.<\/p>\n

By definition, an Incident is the \u201cunplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in the quality of an IT service or a failure of a CI (Configuration Item) that has not yet impacted an IT service.\u201d (ITIL 2011)<\/p>\n

A Problem, on the other hand, is \u201cthe underlying cause of one or more incidents.\u201d (ITIL 2011)<\/p>\n

The Incident Management process aims to restore the service to the customer<\/a> ASAP. Problem Management works patiently and analytically to find the underlying cause of incidents, to create proper workarounds and permanent fixes. Obviously, these two call for different kinds of people. Employees working in Incident Management are engineers who often rose from the Service Desk. Problem Management people are experienced experts who have a lot of time on their hands to peacefully analyze incident trends and spot problems reactively and proactively. And that is the main problem with Problem Management \u2013 those people don\u2019t exist. These are expensive people usually working on important projects up to their necks, often members of middle and higher management. Recruiting them for activities in Problem Management can prove to be an extremely difficult task. This is an example where management support can be crucial.
\n

<\/div>