ITIL Problem Management

What is it?

Problem Management (PM) is one of the components in the ITIL Service Support area. The primary focus of PM is to identify causes of service issues and commission corrective work to prevent recurrences. PM processes are both reactive and proactive - reactive in solving problems in response to incidents, and proactive in identifying and solving potential incidents before they occur.

Problem Management activities include:

• Recording, managing and escalating service problems as appropriate
• Analyzing historical data to identify and eliminate potential incidents before they occur
• Identifying underlying causes of incidents and preventing recurrences
• Developing workarounds or other solutions to incidents
• Submitting change requests to Change Management as required to eliminate known problems

Why should I implement Problem Management?

Benefits of implementing Problem Management processes include:

• Preventing service disruptions
• Maintaining service levels
• Meeting service availability requirements
• Increasing staff efficiency and productivity
• Improving user satisfaction

Problem Management processes are closely integrated with Incident Management, Change Management and Availability Management (AM). Although AM performs the lead role in component failure and system outage analyses, PM performs an important role in obtaining data and analyzing it in support of the studies.

TeamQuest Addresses ITIL Problem Management

TeamQuest directly supports ITIL Problem Management processes by gathering historical performance data and providing detailed analysis tools for quickly identifying the underlying causes of service issues.

TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer offers powerful analysis tools that support Problem Management processes through early bottleneck detection, in-depth investigation and analysis, and trend analysis.

TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer lets you analyze performance reports and investigate bottlenecks in a variety of ways - drill down to the users and processes active at the time of a problem, explore cause-effect relationships, and uncover cycles and patterns in system behavior. TeamQuest View also performs real-time threshold monitoring of systems, alerting you to potential problems before they affect users.

TeamQuest IT Service Reporter automates the production and distribution of performance reports via the Web or in PDF or Excel formats. It allows you to customize reports for different audiences by selecting appropriate charts and graphs, organizing and annotating them, adding a corporate logo, and arranging it all with appropriate explanations and labeling.

TeamQuest Model permits the Problem Management team to simulate corrective changes before they are introduced into the production environment. Doing so helps teams understand the impacts to downstream processes as a result of their corrective activities.

TeamQuest software supports Problem Management by:

• Gathering historical and real-time performance data
• Identifying performance bottlenecks before they occur
• Speeding resolution by providing drill-down capabilities to pinpoint the causes of problems
• Identifying trends to avoid performance problems
• Automatically alerting personnel before problems impact service performance
• Measuring response time for services and infrastructure components
• Providing data on components of response time in multi-tiered environments
• Identifying where bottlenecks are likely to occur