Problem management

The lack of a good analysis of problems is often the cause of recurring incidents. This costs both time and money. The aim of Problem managment is to retrieve structural problems in your infrastructure. Using the Problem management module you can, on the basis of ITIL, analyse problems in three steps, document them and provide employees with resources to work around them.

Investigate the cause of incidents

In the first step it is important to retrieve the cause of incidents. The Problem management module supports the analysis and review of incidents. The Problem management wizard can be used to do this. Using the Problem management wizard you can select criteria which must comply with the incidents that you wish to link to the problem. Once you have indicated a name and description for the problem you can close the analysis.

In Incident cards you can immediately see whether an incident is linked to a problem. By clicking the problem button you can open the problem concerned. From the incident it is also possible to link the incident directly to an existing problem. If the incident matches none of the existing problems, you can create a new problem.

Problem control

After you have used the Problem wizard to link all relevant calls, you can identify the problem. In this second step you can appoint a manager to investigate the problem further. The operator can now begin working on the problem in a practical sense. You can now indicate a duration time for the problem. This does not mean that the problem must be resolved within this time, but that analysis of the problem must be completed before this time. The problem analysis can be divided up into parts, by means of partial problems.

Error control

When the cause of the problem is found, you can make a known error of the problem. The entire organisation will then be notified that a problem exists and what the cause of it is.

Once a known error has been determined you have three options:

You can include the known error in the Knowledge base. Everyone will then know that a new known error has been found within the organisation.
You can include the known error in the Standard solutions. Here you can use a workaround. This means finding a way that employees can continue working without the cause of the problem being removed.
You can make a change proposal for a known error. This option is used when the known error also actually needs to be resolved. If you choose this option the change proposal will go through all steps of the Change management module.

Using the Closure wizard, all incidents linked to the problem can be closed.

Reports

By means of reports you can gain insight into for example the number of problems, the number of incidents for problems or compile a report yourself containing durations and operators of problems.