Beetil

“Houston, we have a problem!”

Actually, it was more of an incident. But let’s not go there.

We like to think of problems as “things that you know are wrong” with particular systems or services. The idea behind problem management is to minimize the impact of these problems on the organisation.

To the newcomer, there is often confusion between incident management and problem management. I often tell people to think of problems as “documented instances of recurring incidents”. I’d love to hear how others differentiate.

A problem usually starts with a symptom. This is, obviously, the details of what the problem is.

Typically, one would then investigate the problem to try and find the root cause. Remember here that incident management has the role of getting the user back up and running asap. It’s the role of problem management to find out why it happened, and how it can be fixed or worked around.

If the root cause is found, then ITIL states that the problem graduates to a known error.

From here, there are really one of three paths that can be taken.
a) find a workaround and document it
b) raise a change (RFC) and fix it
c) or both of the above

There’ll be some cases whereby a workaround may be the most cost effective option, and vice versa. Each to their own.

We’ve got to remember all along that problem management needs to work closely with the incident management function. So generally speaking, the problem management role would take the pro-active approach, looking for incident trends, and documenting problems, known errors and workarounds to assist incident management. Likewise, it’s useful for incident management to assist problem management in finding those trends and helping to refine those workarounds.

Phew! Hope that all made sense.

Let’s now take a look at Beetil Problem Management, starting with the dashboard.

The Problem Dashboard

We’ve made the call that problems with no workarounds are the most important. You know about the problem, but you don’t know how to work around it. Generally speaking, that’s not good.

Beetil also has an “incident activity” marker that not only shows how many incidents are linked to this problem, but also when. This helps provide more context about which problems are causing issues.

Logging a Problem

Logging a problem is easy with Beetil.

Much like an incident, you log the symptoms experienced. As with all Beetil fields like this you can format the notes and attach images as desired.

Problems can be assigned to and from various users and or groups, with discussion along the way.

If a root cause is found, users can enter the details into the problem. Beetil will automatically detect that this problem is now a known error.

A workaround can then be worked upon, and once the “this problem has an effective workaround” box is ticked, the problem is marked has having an effective workaround.

Linkages

As you well know, Beetil loves linkages. Problem management teams can scour the incident database looking for related incidents, and easily link them up.

And if we need to generate (or link to) a change to get this problem fixed up properly we can easily link up with change management.

You can also decide which configuration items are affected.

All in all, through the easily linkages you can create, you’ll get a good idea as to how and why this problem came about, and what’s being done to fix it.

As per any Beetil (our collective term for incident, problem, change and release) you can add yourself to the watchlist and receive email notifications when important stuff occurs. And every change to the problem is logged with in an easily accessible and comprehensive audit trail.

You can also easily generate custom problem reports and scheduled emails using our Beetil smart reporting functionality.

More links in our getting started with Beetil series

• Setting up and configuring services
• Incident Management
• Beetil and the Customer Portal
• Change Management
• Release Management (coming soon)
• Configuration Management

Remember you can always access the help link in the top right hand corner of most pages! And you can always contact us on email at support@beetil.com, or catch us around the Campfire.

Tags: itil, Problem Management, service management

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Getting Started, Hints and Tips, Problem Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.