16 Tips For Getting Started With Problem Management – Part 1

So much has changed with the world in the last year or so, with this unsurprisingly also impacting how we deliver and support IT services within enterprises. For IT service management (ITSM) professionals, this change is on two important fronts as a minimum – first, related to IT services per se, and second, to the business need for digital workflows that enable better business operations and outcomes. With the latter digital transformation being facilitated via enterprise service management, i.e. the sharing of ITSM principles and capabilities, including the ITSM tool, with these other business functions.

Importantly, however, ITSM can still offer more to these other business functions beyond simply incident management and service request fulfillment backed by self-service, workflow automation, and knowledge management. Which have traditionally been the most-adopted ITSM capabilities outside of IT. For example, the discipline of problem management is something that would help every business function in the enterprise to improve its operations and outcomes.

To help, this blog shares the first eight of 16 tips for getting started with problem management – with them relevant to both IT departments and the other business functions (such as human resources (HR), facilities, and customer service) than can benefit from the sharing of proven ITSM capabilities.

Getting started

In my experience, getting started with problem management isn’t necessarily the issue for many corporate IT organizations. The real issue is often maintaining it or getting it right. However, I guess that this still might be the result of not starting problem management in an optimal way.

Global problem management success levels can be clouded though, in that many IT departments say that they “do” problem management (with this usually two-thirds of respondents in ITSM industry surveys) when all they are actually doing is conducting postmortems after major incidents. So, they are not necessarily undertaking – that’s investing time and resource into – systematic or proactive problem management.

A quick reminder of what problem management is

Many of us love our process or practice definitions in IT and ITSM, so it’s worth me reminding you of the ITIL 4 – the service management best practice framework for my non-IT readers – definition of problem management:

“The practice of reducing the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.”

Where a problem is defined as:

“A cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.”

Source: AXELOS ITIL 4 Glossary

Traditionally, two other pertinent definitions worth knowing are:

• Proactive problem management which analyzes incident trends to try and identify problems that might otherwise be missed.
• Reactive problem management which identifies the root causes of problems, creates workarounds to reduce the impact, and initiates changes to permanently resolve problems.

My first eight tips for getting started

For me, not everything is always as obvious as you might assume it to be. Whether you’re a seasoned ITSM pro or someone in a non-IT business function looking to improve operations through problem management. I’ve therefore made a few assumptions when deciding on the tips to share below.

1. Ensure that you fully understand what problem management is. It’s not as straight forward as you might think. For example, Rob England – who I’m cheekily called the artist formerly known as the IT Skeptic – opened up an interesting can of worms way back in 2014 via a blog called “ITSM incident and problem: two names for three things.”
2. Make time for it. You, or someone else, will need to step back from the IT or business function service desk and incident/issue/case management, i.e. step back from the fire-fighting, to focus on problems over the real-time influx of issues. Support’s attention is often so focused on incident resolution that it’s in a perpetual state of “bailing water out of an overflowing bath” rather than looking to “turn off the taps.”
3. Recognize that it might be appropriate to initially bring in an experienced ITSM contractor. Depending on your level of resource and existing problem management expertise, consider leveraging third-party guidance until problem management activities are fully established and proven to be successful (and hopefully such that further internal investment can be justified).
4. Start small, stay focused, and communicate successes. Ideally, your likely limited problem management resources should be focused on a small, prioritized set of initial problems; with problem management activity ramped up as successes are achieved.
5. Use a “Top 5″ problem report each month. Then really focus your efforts on these five problems. This report is based on the analysis of incident trends, and simply identifies the five problems that have had the biggest negative impact on the business each month.
6. Recognize that it doesn’t need to be expensive. You don’t have to start with a team of problem managers and an expensive ITSM or problem management tool. Just start with a desire to improve service delivery and support, and a method to identify and address problems.
7. Try not to stagnate after starting small. Plan your next steps for problem management before you start. If you don’t, in my experience, it’s easy not to grow. Such that not building on your small beginnings might mean that you are just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of how problem management can help your organization.
8. Ensure that you view it as an end-to-end operation. There’s little point in spending countless person hours analyzing incident records and other sources to identify problems if all you end up with is a long list of problems and no solutions. This includes using the number of identified problems as a success measure. Instead, aim to quantify the difference your problem management efforts have made to business operations and outcomes.

Is that all?

No, but please start giving some thought to these first eight tips, and I’ll bring you eight more tips in my next blog.