Problem Management Software for Best Practices
Equally as important as responding to service requests and resolving incidents is the ability to determine why multiple incidents occur and become a problem. Best practices such as ISO 20000-1:2011 or ITIL will typically define a problem as the cause of related incidents; problem management is heavily intertwined with incident management, as the majority of problems originate from multiple incidents.
Problem management helps manage problems to prevent reoccurrence and resolve potential or existing problems. The ability to establish workarounds for problems along with identifying the root cause of the problem helps an organization react quickly for rapid response and establish a proactive approach to preventing problems and resulting incidents from happening, eliminating recurrence, and minimizing the impact of incidents which are not preventable. Strong problem management can reduce downtime and disruption to critical business systems, increase availability and productivity, and decrease rework and costs.
As an organization implements problem management, questions are considered:
- What is our response time to resolving problems?
- How many related incidents occur daily, weekly, monthly?
- Are we creating workarounds and how do we find the root cause of a problem?
- Are we tracking historical data for problems and Known Errors?
- What is our process for escalating problems based on predefined thresholds?
- Do we need to make any changes to prevent problems from occurring and what configuration items will this impact?
- What risks are there to our customers or services?
- How do we increase capacity, reduce costs, and improve IT services?
- Are we reporting, tracking, and monitoring problems?
ITG’s CENTRE software can be integrated with our consulting solutions to help not only speed up the existing project, but also provide your organization an automated system to manage incidents, problems, and changes customized to your organization’s needs.
CENTRE’s embedded workflow for problem management helps:
- Document problems, provides ability to distinguish between incident and problem and links problems to related incidents.
- Facilitate the automatic detection of incidents to problems and Known Errors.
- Apply and classify the priority, impact, and urgency of problems and relationship to configuration items.
- Provide thresholds for customizable escalation based on Service Level Agreements.
- Define problem ownership, monitoring, tracking and communication.
- Provide modifiable automated alerts and customizable reports.
- Create the ability to find quick workarounds for corrective action.
- Establish root cause for trending and a proactive approach to preventing problems.
If your organization is considering implementing ISO 20000-1:2011 or CMMI for Services or wants to improve the availability of services and resolve problems more quickly and effectively, ITG can work with you to streamline your implementation. Integrating CENTRE to manage your internal or external services will provide a faster implementation with more control, increase responsiveness and ability to resolve problems proactively, reduce rework and downtime, and decrease management costs.
Please contact us today to learn how CENTRE can provide an ideal problem management tool integrated with incident, change, and release management as an all-encompassing service management solution.