The Problem Management application

Problem Management helps you to minimize the effects of incidents caused by errors in the IT infrastructure. Problem Management helps you to prevent these errors from recurring. With Problem Management, the appropriate people can identify known errors, implement workarounds, and provide permanent solutions. Additionally, Problem Management enables you to identify errors in IT infrastructure, record them, track the history, find resolutions for them, and prevent their recurrence.

Problem Management helps your personnel to record resolutions and make them easily available to affected user groups, to react more quickly to issues related to incidents, and to proactively resolve issues before incidents occur. Over the long term, the use of Problem Management reduces the volume of incidents, and saves time and money.

Problem Management workflows and categories

Problem Management comes with out-of-box workflows for problems (the “Problem” workflow) and known errors (the "Known Error" workflow). These workflows are associated respectively with the out-of-box "problem" and "known error" categories. The workflows ensure that the problem workflow automatically conforms to the ITIL workflow.

If your business needs require changes to the out-of-box workflow, you can define new workflows. To do this, copy the out-of-box “Problem” workflow, add your own phases and transitions, and then associate the new workflow with the out-of-box “problem” category (or a new category). Each new category that you define enables you to associate a different workflow with a problem. If you define new categories, you can select one to be the default category for problems.

Problem tasks

Problem tasks have a single out-of-box task workflow (the “Problem Task” workflow) and four out-of-box task categories (the “Categorization,” “Investigation,” “Resolution,” and “Review” task categories). The four problem task categories are associated with that single workflow. You can define new workflows for problem tasks by copying and modifying the out-of-box workflow. You can also change the task categories or add other task categories. You can define unique task categories for the tasks that you assign to a problem.

Problem Management alerts

Problem Management creates automatic alerts and notifications. For example, it creates notifications when a problem or task opens, when the owner changes, or when the status changes. It also escalates problems automatically when they are not addressed on pre-agreed schedules. The expected resolution date is based on several elements, including discussion with the stakeholders.