The other Problems with Problem Management

Lee Healey
Oct 5, 2022
3 min read

A few months ago we published an article called ‘The Problem with Problem Management’, focusing on the big challenge around the difficulty of getting exec buy-in and ultimately budget and commitment to support a Problem Management initiative (or ongoing service).

Let’s face it, whilst any Service Management practitioner or savvy IT Director or CIO understands what Problem Management is and the important (essential!) benefits that it can deliver, it is still often pretty hard to justify in terms of a Return on Investment. i.e. how many Incidents and Major Incidents we may be able to prevent, the number of automation opportunities we may (or may not) discover and ultimately, how much money will we save. As such, all too often, it gets pushed to the bottom of the stack as ‘we’re too busy’, ‘we cant afford it’ and so on.

The real question for me here, is how can you afford not to do it?

Let’s have a think about this shall we. What are we too busy doing? Usually Projects, Incidents and Major Incidents (which cost businesses across the globe huge sums of money day in and day out).

Projects - of course these come and go and they can feel as important as incidents themselves sometimes, but of course the classic mistake with projects, is using all of your BAU resource to run and take part in them, with little thought for back-fill. Service drops because we cant afford to do the basics; i.e. Incidents and Problems. The classic ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ scenario. (ooooh I feel a projects blog brewing!).

And then there’s Incidents – ahhhh, those pesky things that take up the vast majority of time for the IT teams in most organisations. “We’re all so busy doing incidents and we’ve been up all night running an MI”, “of course we haven’t got time for Problem Management this week”… WHAAAT??!

Let’s say that again.. “we’re too busy working on Incidents to work on Problem Management…” i.e. the very thing that prevents or reduces Incidents in the first place?!

This is nuts right? But this is happening all day every day, with nowhere near enough effort on the very thing that saves us time and money – Problem Management, because ‘everyone’s busy’, or it's ‘too expensive’ and unfortunately we see this time and time again.

A big consideration is sometimes that organisations simply don’t need, or find it very difficult to justify a full time Problem Manager, whether that’s a perm FTE, or a full time contractor for X months to drive an initiative, as it ‘costs too much’ or ‘we haven’t budgeted for it’.

We of course need to consider that it’s not just about having a Problem Manager to design and run a robust Problem Management process, but it has to be supported and prioritised by appropriate technical resources also and this is critical to the success of Problem Management, to ensure that it’s not just a paper pushing exercise.

So even if you can ‘afford it,’ a lot of the time the Problem Manager wont be fully utilised due to other people’s availability to attend workshops, calls etc, so it’s yet another blocker and again, cant be justified.

For all the reasons laid out in this article, we recently launched ‘Problem Management as a Service’, or ‘thin slice’ Problem Management. Where we design and provide a robust Problem Management policy and process for you and run the process as a ‘thin slice’ of an FTE. So this can be as little as half a day per week, up to a full time burst of activity for a few months, or as an ongoing service (and being completely flexible along the way to scale up and down dependent on the need) in order to help keep you laser focused on Incident prevention and being proactive, rather than purely reactive.

We offer the same ‘thin slice’ solutions for Continual Service Improvement and Change Management.

If this article resonates with you and you’re keen to explore our ‘thin slice’ Problem Management as a Service or other ITSM services further, please reach out for a chat on here, or via email on hello@ITSMPeople.co.uk

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What is ITSM?

Information Technology Service Management processes include a range of activities designed to deliver and support high-quality IT services for your business. These can include incident management, problem management, change management, and service-level management. Additionally, ITSM involves continuous enhancement processes to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs. By adopting strong ITSM practices, your business can improve service quality, customer satisfaction and achieve greater alignment between IT and business objectives. This holistic approach ensures that IT services are effective and integrated with your overall business goals. As ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with your business’s needs, you can ensure that IT processes and services support and enhance business operations. This is achieved through a structured approach to managing IT services, guided by best practices and methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). These models provide guidance on best practices for delivering and supporting technology and other enterprise services and can help companies align their capabilities with their business goals and strategic objectives.
What is ITIL and how does it underpin ITSM?

We adhere to the ITIL Framework in delivering our ITSM consultancy services. ITIL is a globally recognised set of best practices for ITSM that helps businesses provide consistent, high-quality IT services. By implementing ITIL processes and principles, we ensure that your IT operations are standardised, efficient and aligned with industry standards. ITIL4 is the latest version of ITIL, designed to help enterprises navigate the new technological era known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This version introduces a more flexible, modern approach to ITSM, emphasising its integration with other areas of business management.
What are the core practices and processes in ITSM?

Effective ITSM revolves around a number of processes. Whilst there are 34 practice areas in ITIL4, there are often a core set of practices that many of our clients are particularly interested in optimising. As understanding and implementing these processes can significantly enhance the performance and quality of IT services within your organisation. Incident Management Restores all service operations back to normal as soon as possible, minimising to lessen the impact on your operations. This process might involve logging, categorising, prioritising, and resolving incidents, ensuring which can help mitigate disruption to users and the business. Configuration Management Keeps an updated record of IT infrastructure - hardware, software, and network components - in a centralised configuration management database (CMDB). This database provides accurate data on configuration items (CIs) and their relationships. Change Management Ensures any changes to your IT services are controlled and coordinated. This process evaluates the impact of changes, approving them through a structured workflow, and ensuring successful implementation with minimal risk. Service level Management Defines, negotiates, and monitors service level agreements (SLAs) between the service provider and the customer. This process ensures that agreed-upon service quality and performance levels are consistently met. Asset Management Tracks and manages your IT assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficient use and cost control. You maintain an accurate inventory of hardware, software, and other IT resources through this. Problem Management Identifies, analyses and resolves the root causes of incidents. Proactively addressing underlying issues can prevent recurring incidents. This, in turn, provides improved system stability and reduced downtime. Request Management Handles the lifecycle of user service requests, such as access to applications, software installations or information enquiries. It ensures requests are managed efficiently to provide a streamlined approach that fulfils user needs and enhances satisfaction. Knowledge Management Captures, organises and shares knowledge to improve efficiency and support decision-making. By leveraging a centralised knowledge base, your IT teams can quickly resolve incidents and problems, and end-users can find the right solutions to common issues.
Why is ITSM important to organisations and their IT (and Enterprise) teams?

Implementing the right ITSM strategy and optimising your tooling can provide a range of benefits for your company, including: Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings By streamlining processes and automating routine tasks, ITSM can help your enterprise work more efficiently and reduce the time and resources required to deliver and support IT services. Good ITSM is a silent enabler of success across a range of organisational goals. Improved Compliance and Risk Management ITSM can help you ensure that your IT systems and processes comply with industry regulations and standards. It also ensures that you are effectively managing risks associated with your IT operations. This can help you avoid costly disruptions and legal consequences. Increased Productivity Effective ITSM practices can help your business prevent problems and fix them quickly if they do occur. This can help you lower costs—outages cost money—and increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Better Customer Satisfaction You can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships by delivering high-quality IT services that meet customers' needs. Improved Service Quality ITSM ensures that IT services are delivered consistently and meet agreed-upon service levels, leading to higher customer satisfaction and better overall service quality. Business Continuity ITSM processes like incident and problem management ensure that disruptions are minimised and services are quickly restored to ensure business continuity. Strategic Alignment ITSM aligns IT services with business objectives, ensuring that technology initiatives support and drive business growth. This alignment helps you make informed decisions and prioritise projects that add the most value. Enhanced Collaboration ITSM promotes a collaborative environment where IT teams can work together more effectively, sharing knowledge and best practices to improve your delivery of services. Proactive problem-solving Through problem management and a proactive approach, ITSM helps your IT teams identify and address the root causes of incidents to prevent future issues and reduce downtime. Continuous Improvement ITSM encourages continuous monitoring and improvement of IT processes, allowing your IT teams to refine and enhance their service delivery regularly. Better Resource Management With ITSM, IT teams can manage resources more effectively, ensuring that personnel, technology, and budget are allocated optimally to support business requirements.
Do you provide ITSM tooling support and what tools do you specialise in?

The ITSM People are completely agnostic with ITSM tools and not tied to any vendors. Given the close relationship between ITSM related processes and ITSM tools, we often get involved in tool selection projects, or making recommendations on how to improve tools and get the best value from them. We work with tools such as ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, ManageEngine, Fresh, Halo and Xurrent.