Should a Problem be opened for every Major Incident
By ITIL® from Experience©
While it is not common practice to open a problem record based on a single incident, many organizations always log a Problem Record for their Major Incident.
Some organizations open a Problem Record as soon as a Major Incident is declared. Often it is done to involved specialists from the Problem Management Process when they are not usually involved in resolving Incidents. Thus, logging a Problem engages these specialists to help resolve the Major Incident. In other words the problem record initiates their involvement and participation. However, their involvement could be achieved without having to create a Problem record as a trigger. ITIL® makes a provision for involving the Problem Manager during a Major Incident1 , although it does not specify if a Problem Record is created or not.
Other organizations systematically log a Problem once the Major Incident has been resolved. Consequently, the Problem Management process is used to find the root cause, and possibly raise a Request For Change (RFC) to prevent such Incidents from happening again.
Even so, always opening a problem record is not required. The Incident Management Closure activity includes a decision to: "Determine (in conjunction with resolver groups) whether it is likely that the incident could recur and decide whether any preventative action is necessary to avoid this. In conjunction with Problem Management, raise a Problem Record in all such cases to that preventive action is initiated2 .”
Several organizations conduct a post-incident review for all their Major Incidents. When the post-incident review is focused on gathering Lessons Learned from People’s response and the Process, Problem Management can then focus on finding the technological root cause.
Whether the problem record is always created at the onset of a Major Incident, upon its resolution or is optional depends on the desired outcome and level of discipline required to ensure that provisions are implemented to prevent Major Incidents to avoid “significant disruption to the business.3 ." That being said, Problems should not be logged simply to identify trends since this can be done without a problem records by simply analyzing past incidents.
Published on: 2014-08-28
{QUOTE()}"Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back." Piet Hein
Related:
- Who closes the Major Incident
- Should a Major Incident be declared if it was resolved automatically by the fail-over
- How to first introduce Problem Management
- Which problem management technique should we use
- Should everyone be allowed to log problems
- Should a problem be logged for every unexplained incident
Category:
ITIL Process > Incident Management
ITIL Process > Problem Management
Copyright 2014 - ITIL® from Experience - D.Matte