I am struggling with the demarcation between Incident Management and Problem Management. For example, the Service Desk does the initial investigation and diagnosis of an Incident and eventually escalates to third level. If at this point there is still not a resolution should the hand-off occur to Problem Management? Is it acceptable to define the hand-off based on priority and impact? On the other hand, perhaps the best practice is to determine hand-off based on the criteria defined by the Incident Manager and the Problem Manager. If the answer is the defined criteria, I would appreciate advice on how we could proceed since those roles do not yet exist. We are beginning to define our Problem Management process and while we have process owners identified, we have not yet made any organizational changes so these Service Management roles do not yet exist.

Dee

Dear Dee,

You are right on both counts. Defining the handoff based on priority and impact is an excellent idea because it moves the problem into a status where it will get the attention it needs. Furthermore, once you have identified the Incident Manager and the Problem Manager, they will work together to identify criteria for handing off an Incident into Problem Management.

It is a common misconception that unresolved Incidents eventually turn into Problems. In fact, an Incident most correctly can be described as a “signal” that there is a Problem, such as a high-priority Incident (i.e., major Incident), many seemingly related Incidents within a short period of time (i.e., many calls about the same Configuration Item), or something is obviously broken in the infrastructure (i.e., there is a Known Error in a software module).

Your Problem Management team is often a multi-disciplinary team that works together to find and resolve the underlying root cause of the Problem. Also, the Problem Management process is responsible for pro-active Problem resolution; i.e., finding problems that have not yet occurred.

I think you will find that your idea to assemble the Problem Management team based on the priority of the Incident will work quite well for resolving Problems that occur in your infrastructure. Later, when you have identified the personnel who will support these two processes, you can move into a higher level of Problem Management and begin doing Proactive Problem Resolution, which you would initiate via criteria defined by the two managers.

I hope these ideas help you in your planning for these processes and support roles.