Problem Management Concepts and Principles
Purpose and definitions
This domain tests whether you can define problem management in ITIL 4 terms and distinguish a problem, an incident, a known error and a workaround. The practice purpose is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.
- Problem: a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.
- Incident: an unplanned interruption to, or reduction in, service quality.
- Known error: a problem that has been analysed but not yet resolved; its record normally captures the root cause and any workaround.
- Workaround: a temporary way to restore service that does not remove the cause.
Problem management is both reactive (responding to incidents and major incidents) and proactive (using trends, event data, risk analysis and supplier information to find potential causes before incidents recur). It does not replace incident management: incident management restores service; problem management reduces recurrence and impact. Not every incident needs a problem record; prioritise based on impact, urgency, recurrence and risk.
Worked example
A service desk sees 30 VPN disconnects in a week. Incident management restores access each time. Problem management opens a problem record, analyses patterns, finds an expired certificate on one gateway, documents a workaround (connect to the secondary gateway) as a known error, and raises a change to renew the certificate. Reasoning: the workaround reduces impact while the change removes the cause; the known error helps future incident resolution.
Traps
Do not treat a problem as a large incident, or a known error as an open outage. Do not close a problem because a workaround exists. Do not open a problem for every isolated incident, and do not run problem management only after major incidents.