{"id":4491,"date":"2014-07-29T11:14:33","date_gmt":"2014-07-29T11:14:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multiacademstg.wpengine.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2014\/07\/29\/itil-iso-20000-problem-management-organizing-problem-resolution\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T13:38:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T13:38:27","slug":"itil-iso-20000-problem-management-organizing-problem-resolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2014\/07\/29\/itil-iso-20000-problem-management-organizing-problem-resolution\/","title":{"rendered":"ITIL and ISO 20000 Problem Management \u2013 Organizing for problem resolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remember this situation? You\u2019re running Windows. The blue screen forces you to reboot your PC. And then it happens again.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2013\/05\/21\/incident-management-itil-solid-foundations-operational-processes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Incident Management<\/a>\u00a0= reboot your PC. And your service (usage of PC) is available again.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2013\/08\/05\/itil-problem-management-getting-rid-problems\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Problem Management<\/a>\u00a0= figuring out what actually happened (why does that PC get the blue screen), and how to prevent such incidents from occurring.<\/p>\n<p>Incidents are straightforward \u2013 you need to provide your users with the agreed functionality as soon as possible (to use their PC and be able to send\/receive e-mails, write documents, do calculations\u2026 etc.). And \u2013 that\u2019s it. Complications take place when we start to deal with problems. Problem resolution methodologies are well known:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Brainstorming,<\/li>\n<li>Chronological analysis,<\/li>\n<li>Pain value analysis,<\/li>\n<li>Kepner and Tregoe,<\/li>\n<li>5-whys,<\/li>\n<li>Fault isolation,<\/li>\n<li>Affinity mapping,<\/li>\n<li>Hypothesis testing,<\/li>\n<li>Technical observation point,<\/li>\n<li>Ishikawa diagrams, and<\/li>\n<li>Pareto analysis.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Any of the chosen methodologies require an organization to get the problems resolved. The more critical issue is when Problem Management organization has to be set.<br \/>\n<div id=\"middle-banner\" class=\"banner-shortcode\"><\/div><script>loadMiddleBanner();<\/script><br \/>\n<div id=\"side-banner-trigger\" class=\"banner-shortcode\"><\/div><\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">What makes it complex?<\/h2>\n<p>Before declaring something to be complex, let me elaborate. Getting to the problem resolution is not a one-dimensional process. Well, if you have just a few (but, really few) services \u2013 it could be. But companies strive to extend their offerings and, there you go \u2013 many different parties, know-how, technologies, etc. are the common ground that lead things to become complicated.<\/p>\n<p>Problem Management has to the find root cause of one or more incidents. <em>Root cause<\/em> means to figure out what caused an incident. Take a telecom as an example. Many, many customers using a bunch of services. In the background, there are many departments inside the telecom organization that are supporting those services. Problem Management organization has the following challenges:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Skills \u2013 Problem Management requires expertise. And experts in one particular area are not common. In fact, they are rare.<\/li>\n<li>Diversity \u2013 Knowledge is spread across the company.<\/li>\n<li>External parties \u2013 I experienced that companies are very often using external parties to gain know-how (in form of the service or the product). That know-how is needed during the problem resolution procedure.<\/li>\n<li>Availability \u2013 Problems, in certain areas of technology, usually don\u2019t occur all the time. Meaning, there are no permanently dedicated resources. Take, for example, database experts. They are expensive resources involved in projects as much as possible (organizations tend to use their scarce resources as much as possible). When there is a problem to solve, it could be tough to get such experts out of their projects.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Well, so far about challenges. Let\u2019s see what could be done to overcome them.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">The approach to Problem Management organization<\/h2>\n<p>First of all, there is no recipe for how to organize a Problem Management support organization. Every situation and organization is unique and requires its own approach. From my experience, there are several possibilities; let me describe the two most common:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Stand-alone organization \u2013 this would be the situation when you have permanent Problem Management organization with resources permanently dedicated to problem resolution. This is useful when you don\u2019t have diversity of services and you have many problems to solve within the same area of expertise.<\/li>\n<li>Shared resources \u2013 this is the usual situation, applicable when there are many different services, and expertise and know-how are spread across the organization. In real life this means that Problem Management uses resources when they need them. It has to be clear where those resources are. One of my projects had exactly that situation. It was a small telecom with many services. They could not afford to have a dedicated group for Problem Management. Instead, they had a Problem Manager and experts across the organization. Depending on the topic, they used resources in various organizational units. In this way, their Problem Management did not accumulate underused resources, and they used their best experts when they were needed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-10183\" src=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/sites\/6\/2015\/07\/Problem_Management_organizations.jpg\" alt=\"Problem Management organizations\" width=\"668\" height=\"250\" \/><em>Figure: Two different kinds of Problem Management organizations<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Roles and responsibilities are another important parameter when organizing for Problem Management. According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/what-is-itil\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ITIL<\/a> Service Operation book, there are two important roles in Problem Management organization: Problem Manager and Problem Analyst.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Problem Manager<\/strong> is responsible to organize processes, resources and tools that are needed to resolve the problems. This is much easier when there is a stand-alone organization. When shared resources are used, the Problem Manager is responsible to organize needed resources and coordinate their activities. This could get even more complicated when, e.g., external resources are used. <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/?rel=relationship-and-agreement-processes&amp;doc=operational-level-agreement-ola-\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Operational Level Agreement<\/a> (OLA, for internal resources) and <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/documentation\/underpinning-contract\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Underpinning Contracts<\/a> (UC, for external resources) are within the Problem Manager\u2019s responsibility. Read more about OLA and UC here: <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/knowledgebase\/slas-olas-ucs-itil-iso-20000\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SLAs, OLAs and UCs in ITIL and ISO 20000<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Problem Analyst<\/strong> \u2013 this is the person who actively and productively contributes to problem resolution. Independent of the organizational setup, the most important characteristic of a Problem Analyst is \u2013 expertise. If the problem requires different kinds of expertise, then several analysts will be involved (as a team).<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Hard, or fun game?<\/h2>\n<p>Problem resolution targets are defined in the <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/?rel=relationship-and-agreement-processes&amp;doc=service-level-agreement-sla-\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Service Level Agreement (SLA)<\/a>, or at least it should be, though I rarely found an explicit definition of Problem Management in the scope of a SLA. But within the SLA, there should be a time determinant that makes problem resolution a serious \u201cgame.\u201d Depending on the situation, there are many challenges when organizing for Problem Management. Given customers and respective SLAs as drivers, and our own know-how and experience as instruments, problem resolution should not be hard \u2013 but rather a fun game.<\/p>\n<p><em>To implement ISO 20000 easily and efficiently, use our<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ISO 20000 Documentation Toolkit<\/a> <em>that provides step-by-step guidance for full ISO 20000 compliance.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remember this situation? You\u2019re running Windows. The blue screen forces you to reboot your PC. And then it happens again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":4492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[403,416,401,344,447,204],"class_list":["post-4491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-agreement","tag-incident","tag-isoiec-20000","tag-itil","tag-problem","tag-service"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4491"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18414,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4491\/revisions\/18414"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}