Problem Management Processes and Activities
The workflow
This domain tests the end-to-end problem management process and the activities that turn a problem record into reduced risk. ITIL 4 describes three repeating phases: problem identification, problem control and error control.
- Problem identification: detect and record problems from incident trends, major incident reviews, monitoring and event data, supplier notifications, CI and risk information, and proactive analysis. Record the problem, its symptoms, affected services and priority.
- Problem control: analyse the problem, establish root cause, identify and document workarounds, and create or update known error records. Prioritise analysis by impact, urgency and recurrence.
- Error control: manage known errors to resolution - evaluate options, raise a change request, test and implement the fix, verify the outcome, update the known error database, and close the problem.
Throughout, link problem records to incidents, changes, CIs and knowledge articles. Use impact and urgency to prioritise; a severe, recurring problem should outrank a low-impact one-off. Closure should confirm that the cause has been removed or that a documented workaround is accepted, and that records are updated.
Worked example
A payment service times out repeatedly. Incident management restarts the service. Problem management records a problem, links 15 incidents, finds connection-pool exhaustion as root cause, documents a restart workaround as a known error, and raises a change to increase pool size. After implementation, monitoring shows no recurrence; the problem and known error are updated and closed.
Traps
Jumping straight to a fix before defining the problem; closing after a workaround without a known error record; failing to link incidents or changes; skipping verification and post-implementation review; and treating problem closure as the same as incident closure.