Rob - interesting - but unfortunately the crisis management term is already in play and we might be tempted to repeat past errors in renaming something that has yet to be properly defined and matured in ITIL - for some obscure reason - to something that already has standing in the non-IT community! My suggestion is that ITIL first respect and inspect existing problem management methods, that define problems in stakeholder impact terms and perform cause analysis the way non-IT industries, such as healthcare, do. Then, similarly inspect and understand related concepts and methods, such as used by the White House and others to detect and manage a crisis... and lead us all through how they can cooperate. Anyway, how about moving ITIL Problem Management to where I feel it belongs - to the Continual Service Improvement book - that would be a good first step?

Posted by: Ian Clayton | August 26, 2010 2:17 PM

Hi Ian,

Thank you for the comments and apologies for the delay as travel over the last few weeks has allowed me to reflect a little on some of your comments (also some more public discussion) before replying.  

There are indeed established problem management methods in the community such as the Ishikawa Fishbone in use today (to various degree's of success).  

The fundamental challenge I see in most implementations of Service Management is the organization claims a problem management process and instead they are using some extended incident management.  Now that is not necessarily bad, indeed, it could be quite effective, but, when you have a crisis you need to step up the reaction and more importantly the priority.  Should this be a subset of Continuity - probably, does this mean we could remove a process - hey i am all for that!

Thanks again!

Rob

Posted by: Robert Stroud | September 2, 2010 10:20 PM

Unfortunately you have misunderstood the role of Problem Management. What you call a crisis, is actually a major incident, and thus it's within the realm of Incident Management. There is actually a Major Incident model described for those crises.

Problem Management is about understanding the root cause of an incident. Problem Management has plenty of time and is not necessarily involved in actually handling the resolution of the incident. It's about finding the root cause and removing the root cause. You once said during an ITSMF seminar that when an airplane looses an engine, that would be a problem. No. That is a major incident. Or a crisi.  The problem would be bad manufacturing, metal fatigue, poor security allowing sabotage or whatever. Problem management is NOT about crisis management, it's about identifying the root cause.  

Posted by: Martin | September 7, 2010 3:20 AM

Hi Martin.

Thanks for your comments!

I have spoken to a number of organizations and the analyst community and unfortunately I find that "true problem management" is rarely undertaken.   In this reactive world, we solve the outage and typically move on to the next issue.  This said, a major outage in my opinion and that of my CIO in my last practical role was immediately escalated to our problem management process which did include

root cause analysis, trending and input to continual improvement.  Unfortunately I see so little realt problem management implemented – which is a pity don’t you think?

Thanks again!

Rob

Posted by: Robert Stroud | September 10, 2010 12:30 AM