Change problem management tools

Another way to look at it is — a problem is an underlying condition that could have negative impacts on the service and therefore needs to be addressed. Problems have a lifecycle that starts when the problem is created often by a change in the environment , includes identification and the stages of diagnosis and remediation, and ends when the problem is resolved either through some action being taken or the underlying situation going away.

The portfolio part of problem management is responsible for maintaining information about problems that exist in the environment, any workarounds that have been developed, and the resolution options that have been identified.

This information enables problem managers to make decisions that will reduce the number and impact of incidents. The difference between incident management and problem management is one of the biggest causes for confusion in ITIL and service management processes.

While these processes are very closely related, they are intentionally different and separate. Incident management is tasked with responding to an event that has occurred, minimizing impact to the business, and restoring service as quickly as possible.

Problem management is tasked with understanding the root cause of why the event occurred and how to prevent it from happening in the future. It might take multiple incidents before problem management has enough data to analyze what is going wrong and figure out what steps can be taken to correct the situation.

As a result, communication and coordination between incident managers and problem managers is essential. It takes the knowledge gained through monitoring, incident management and other parts of service operations and feeds them into the continuous service improvement processes that will help make the services you provide to users more robust and dependable.

Problem managers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of problems to ensure that they are clearly understood, and appropriate actions are taken. Problem managers will often interface with incident management staff and technical resources to ensure diagnostic data is captured about associated incidents and environmental conditions related to the problem.

Problem managers are responsible for performing root cause analysis RCA to help the organization identify not only why an incident occurred, but also when and how the underlying problem was introduced into the environment.

Root cause analysis often results in a number of alternative resolutions being identified and the problem manager plays a key role in helping to qualify the alternatives relative to cost, benefit and risk to provide a recommendation to management decision makers. It is common for resolution actions to take some time to be channeled through the appropriate change and release management processes. Although incident management and problem management are separate processes, problem managers will typically use the same tools, similar categorization, impact and priority coding systems as their incident manager counterparts as a way of fostering effective collaboration between process areas.

Reactive problem management - which is executed as a part of service operation focuses on the follow-up to incidents that have already occurred. Proactive problem management - is initiated in Service Operation but generally considered part of continual service improvement focuses on identifying problems from environmental signals and preventing incidents from occurring at all.

Proactive problem management aims to identify future incidents and prevent them from re-occurring by identifying and eliminating the root cause before they can cause service impacting incidents. Proactive problem analysis is heavily influenced by data generated through automated monitoring capabilities, analysis of change records, and the use of trend analysis. Proactive problem management differs from its reactive counterpart by addressing three key areas.

Proactive detection: which is executed as a part of service operation focuses on the follow-up to incidents that have already occurred. Problem prevention: is initiated in service operation but generally considered part of continual service improvement focuses on identifying problems from environmental signals and preventing incidents from occurring at all. Preemptive action: which is executed as a part of service operation focuses on taking preemptive action on systems that are known to cause problems.

Fault diagnosis: is initiated in service operation and focuses on performing Root Cause Analysis on problems in order to pinpoint the origin of the problem.

Reactive Problem Management reacts to recurring incidents by analyzing the root cause and providing a long-term fix. It is crucial to identify these repeating incidents as problems.

Incident Management aims at restoring the services as fast as possible and therefore, often misses out on the underlying cause of incidents. The Incident Management team transfers such incidents to the Problem Management team for detailed research and analysis. This handover is crucial and timing is more important in order to maintain service integrity. The Incident Management team should pass on information such as incident category, affected CIs, criticality, and impact.

Reactive Problem Management starts with checking incident patterns and it includes reviewing past incidents in the service desk. ITIL defines problem management as a part of service operations with strong relationships to incident management, change management and continuous service improvement.

It breaks problem management down into the following sub-processes:. Proactive problem identification - improve the overall availability of services by proactively identifying problems so they can be solved, or workarounds identified before future incidents occur.

Problem diagnosis and resolution - identify the underlying root cause of a problem and initiate the most appropriate solution. Problem and error control - improve the overall availability of services by proactively identifying problems so they can be solved, or workarounds identified before future incidents occur. Problem closure and evaluation - ensure that after a problem is solved, the problem record contains a full historical description and that known error and knowledge records are updated.

Major problem review - review the resolution of a major problem to ensure problem situations have been fully eliminated, capture lessons learned, and identify preventative actions such as process changes that should be undertaken to avoid problem recurrence. You can unify a support team that is composed of members in many locations. This will enable you to manage round-the-clock support provided by technicians located at different points on the globe.

Operators can also be home-based. This is a subscription service and you need to request a quote to discover prices. NinjaOne is available for a day free trial. SolarWinds Service Desk is delivered as a service over the web. However, the company will give the software for the systems for customers to install on-premises on request.

This online service was built according to the processes of the ITIL standards , so it ensures that its asset management and customer support systems are fully able to tackle incident management. Service Desk won an award and topped a list in a recent comparison report that you can download here.

SolarWinds bought Samanage in The Samanage system was cutting edge in the field of ITIL-supporting business software because it includes AI processes, such as its help-center simulated technician on live chat. The SolarWinds Service Desk system is at the heart of its incident management solution. This includes three main elements: ticketing, a self-help portal, and a knowledge base.

The service is available in three package levels. The company presents the Standard package as fulfilling incident management requirements. However, this just refers to the Help Desk management system. To get all of the functions needed for the full ITIL-defined incident management lifecycle you need to go for the highest plan.

The Business plan gives you Help Desk functions and also change management, service catalogs, and SLA performance tracking. The top plan, called Professional , gives you license and contract management and advanced automation. The inclusion of workflows and investigation scripts in Service Desk helps guide your team of agents when they investigate the source of a user-reported problem.

The ITIL processes built into the software extend that investigation phase through to solution proposals and project management tasks. This makes the service accessible to any size of organization. You can get a day free trial which is a full version of the Professional package to test the system for yourself. The remarkable attribute of Spiceworks Help Desk is that it is free to use. This is a fantastic deal considering the sophistication of the software.

On the downside, the system is ad-supported with publicity appearing permanently in a side panel of the dashboard. This is a software package that installs on Windows and Mac OS. You can opt to use the system online instead and avoid having to maintain the software on your servers.

Spiceworks has a very active user community and there are thousands of plugins available on the community forum. These enable you to adapt the system to integrate with other applications that you might use — the providers write many of the extensions of those apps.

The agent dashboard includes a note-taking and messaging feature, which is a great conduit for collaborative solutions to incidents. Zendesk is predominantly a Help Desk system. However, its excellent reporting and analysis modules make it a worthy entry in this guide to incident management software systems. Zendesk is a very widely used system. It links together several avenues that enable users to solve problems before resorting to the IT staff for assistance.

These features revolve around a knowledge management base with a searchable advice database. The next line of assistance lies with contact channels. Zendesk includes a chat window, which speeds up incident responses and problem resolution through interactive inquiries. This AI-driven virtual assistant can be set to present itself in the chatbox provided for contact by the user to support technicians. By working through guided questions, the chatbot will provide a solution without recourse to busy technicians.

The ability of the system to rank successful solutions provides a machine learning process that continually improves the time it takes to find a solution. The ticket management system in Zendesk enables agents to be assigned as the next available assistant. Tickets can be raised through a phone call or an email as well as via chat. They can be tracked, forwarded, split, and merged.

Monitoring and reporting functions enable you to assess agent performance and benchmark expected turnover. The reporting function also supports SLA goal compliance. Zendesk is charged on a per-agent per-month basis. The system is available in two levels, which are Professional and Enterprise. Both levels are suitable for incident management support. You can get a free trial of Zendesk to put it through its paces. It is broken up into five areas of competence, which are published as separate volumes.

These are:. The Incident Management process focuses on the actions needed to address problems as they unexpectedly occur in order to get all systems functioning satisfactorily.

Each of these functional teams will need to be involved in the Incident Management process and all will probably use different tools as well as collaborate with commonly used incident management tools. In many Incident Management responsibilities, IT departments and particularly managed service providers, could not function without support software. Incident management tools aid in the tracking of problem resolution, team management, project management, and time management.

All of these fields improve efficiency, reduce the possibility of human error, and save time and money. Many leading incident management tools also deploy AI processes and machine learning to reduce the workload of human resources.

Although the problems that incident management deals with show there is room for improvement, the ITIL Incident Management process itself does not include practices for change. The topic of adjusting systems to avoid the repetition of discovered problems is the responsibility of the Continual Service Improvement sector of ITIL. However, Incident Management operatives will need to alert the system improvement managers of any inherent system problems, This, together with fields such as risk management will also feedback information to the business function teams who are responsible for the Service Strategy and Service design actions of ITIL.

Getting comprehensive incident tracking tools in place and getting a full inventory of all of your equipment prepares you for when problems with your system will arise. There will be incidents arising from both your hardware and software.

Some level of disruption is unavoidable. However, with the right tools and trained staff, you can minimize the damage that system errors cause and keep your business running.

The 3-strike rule tries to get around the ITIL demand that only the user or client business can mark an incident as resolved. Problems arise when the user or business contact that raised the problem is unresponsive when asked to sign off and state that the problem has been resolved. The 3-strike rule states that if three attempts have been made to seek closure and no response was received, the operator can close the incident. An incident management issue is an event that prevents a system user from getting on with a task, a problem management issue is a service shortfall that is the root cause of a number of incidents.

So, incident management fixes immediate problems and problem management fixes underlying problems. Automated incident management creates workflows and information sharing mechanisms that remove the need for management intervention in service desk scenarios.

For example, a ticket can be raised by the user through a website. That request flows through a text recognition program that assigns the task to a work queue. That work queue prioritizes tasks and makes them available to task management screens used by individual technicians.

The task manager includes task escalation and completion notification. All stages of the process are logged and statistics on throughput volumes will be stored for analysis. The segmentation of processes within the ITIL Service Operation topic makes it easy to separate the work that needs to be carried out to identify and solve an incident and the efforts needed to work on problems.

An incident is dealt with immediately, a problem needs planning and a strategy to resolve. Solving a problem will prevent the incidences that it caused from occurring again.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Comparitech uses cookies. More info. Menu Close. We are reader supported and may receive a commission when you make purchases using the links on our site. We deep dive into Incident Management Software Tools and how they can help your organization's help desk response. Stephen Cooper. Makes discovery and management of IT assets affordable for any size organization. Start a day free trial.

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