ITSM Problem Management

There are normally 2 pieces in Problem Management:

• Proactive Problem Management
• Reactive Problem Management 

The proactive piece goes into identifying patterns coming out of all the unexpected symptoms within the operations IT environment. This is normally done by a handful of senior Incident Management(Level 2) in conjunction with the Engineering team(Level 3) personnel within each technology tower. Once the root cause is identified, change management takes over to fix the underlying issue removing the problem from the production environment. Most organizations have dedicated staff performing Incident Management but seldom is it justifiable to have dedicated Problem Management team working on the problem queue. 

Here is a SOP and its supporting form that addresses the reactive problem management piece taking advantage of the opportunity to identify and implement improvement strategies after a major incident. The process also improves customer relations as it can be initiated by the customer and the customers encouraged to actively participate in the problem solving meetings. 

Updated August 2012