What I have witnessed many times is that SLAs (Service Level Agreements) define incident handling, including incident resolution time. That is OK until you face two opposing views \u2013 customers and service delivery, i.e., maintenance people (usually represented by the Service Level Manager). What happens is that once the incident occurs, IT resolves it and considers the SLA to be fulfilled. The customer has the same view until the same incident happens again. Then they start asking: \u201cWhy do you consider it resolved, but it happened again?\u201d And, they have a point.<\/p>\n
By resolving incidents \u2013 you (usually) haven\u2019t resolved the root cause. That\u2019s the job of Problem Management. The trouble is that the definition of problems is (usually) not defined in the scope of the SLA. If they were defined, then both the customer and the IT organization would benefit. The customer would be assured that the root cause of the (one or more) incidents will be found and eliminated, and the IT service provider would know that they had enough time to find the root cause. One important step in problem resolution is the Problem Record.<\/p>\n
A problem, according to ITIL<\/a>\u00a0as well as ISO 20000<\/a>, is defined as a root cause of one or more incidents<\/em>. It is the job of the Problem Management process to handle problems throughout their lifecycles. By \u201clifecycle,\u201d I mean \u2013 from the time they are created until they are resolved (let\u2019s stop with resolved, because if we consider continual improvement, then problem-related information would be used longer and much more widely).<\/p>\n In order to have all relevant information (about a particular problem, as well as history of resolved problems) needed to resolve the problem \u2013 a respective record must exist. That\u2019s the Problem Record. Quite contrary to incidents (which must be resolved as quickly as possible), problems require significantly more time to be resolved. This also implies that many activities (e.g., analysis, trials and errors, various diagnostic activities, measurements, etc.) will be performed until you get to the point that you can say: \u201cThat\u2019s the root cause of the incident.\u201d All of those activities will be documented in the Problem Record. And that\u2019s your knowledge. You can apply it later on while resolving some similar kinds of problems and\/or incidents.<\/p>\n Read the articles ITIL and ISO 20000 Problem Management \u2013 Organizing for problem resolution<\/a> and ITIL Problem Management: getting rid of problems<\/a> to learn more about Problem Management.
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