The problem management process is used to help organizations locate the cause of issues that are occurring within their IT environment.
In ITIL terms, the purpose of the process is to ‘seek to minimize the adverse impact of incidents and problems on the business caused by underlying errors within the IT infrastructure, and to proactively prevent recurrence of incidents related to those errors.’
Successful problem management can significantly reduce costs, save time, and increase business confidence in IT. Our collective experience, however, led us to realize that organizations often do not have the right tools in place to aid their problem management process, and so the practice does not give them the outcomes they desire.
Using the right tool to support you will really increase your ability to perform the process well and give you the results you want.
Read on to learn about how our problem management software could help your organization.
4 WAYS OUR PROBLEM MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE CAN HELP YOUR ORGANIZATION
1) Increase Service Availability
Problem management is all about finding the root cause of an IT issue and fixing it to prevent that issue from recurring. Sometimes, however, it isn’t that simple and the cause can often be difficult to fix. This results in repeat incidents as, until the cause is resolved, the problem will keep popping up.
When this happens it is best practice to log a known error and, if available, provide a workaround that can fix the incident when it happens until the cause itself can be tackled.
Providing a workaround means that your IT staff have the ability to resolve incidents quicker; rather than having to run around to find the fix it is already documented for them to follow.
Workarounds increase your service availability by getting users back up and running while you continue to troubleshoot the problem.
An issue with known errors (and their workarounds) however, is that if you have a lot of them logged it can be difficult for IT support employees to remember each and every fix.
With Mint Service Desk’s problem management software you have access to a sophisticated known error database where you can record every problem record and it’s available workaround. This allows staff to easily identify the fix when an incident comes in and they can even link the incident to the existing problem record.
Having related incidents attached to the known error database allows you to understand, at a glance, the business impact of each issue allowing for data driven prioritization of your problem records.
If the workaround is a basic IT fix you can even make this information available to your end users so they may resolve the incident themselves. This means the issue can be fixed quicker as there is no need to wait for support and you can reduce incoming tickets to your IT service desk.
Our software also gives you the ability to prevent future problems by monitoring your IT estate, allowing you to find problems before they transform into incidents that impact your end users.
When you have the ability to find and fix problems within your infrastructure immediately you are able to increase your service availability by preventing outages or service degradation.
2) Reduce Repeat Incidents
Our software enables you to check out trends in your incident management data to help you spot the repetition of incidents.
Usually, when incidents of the same nature come in over a period of time, it means that there is a problem lurking within your IT environment.
Sometimes repeat incidents are obvious and will be reported by your IT service desk agents as they notice the influx. Othertimes, however, repeat incidents may occur more infrequently and this is where analyzing your data comes in handy.
With Mint Service Desk we make it easy by offering reporting options that allow you to display your data in clear, easy to understand formats, helping you to quickly spot unusual trending patterns.
Once found, because the software integrates with other areas, you can easily create a problem record and link the repeat incidents to it.
Now that a problem has been identified your IT teams can work to resolve this and prevent further incidents from occurring.
3) Improve Communication
One problem that affects teams within ITSM is that they often feel like separate entities rather than working together as a collective. This makes communication tricky and key messages are sometimes misinterpreted or lost altogether.
To bridge the communication gap our software lets you send notifications to key users and groups to let them know about problem records that have been logged, updated, or closed down.
These notifications mean that the relevant people are kept informed at all times and help your teams to work closer together.
With the right set up your IT staff will be able to tackle problems quicker and more accurately than they have been able to do before.
Because our software integrates with other process areas, you will find that your employees can easily share knowledge. Resolution of problems becomes far easier when everybody is singing from the same hymn sheet.
4) Reduce Costs
Because our software helps you to increase your service availability you’ll find that you are able to reduce costs.
✓ Less money is spent on IT support as there are fewer incidents to fix.
✓ Your organization will save money as outages and service degradation become less frequent.
✓ Incidents are fixed faster, repeat incident levels drop, and future incidents are prevented.
Problem management is a vital process to follow within ITSM if you wish to prevent repeat incidents, locate root causes, decrease system downtime, and save your organization money.
Keeping critical business applications running around the clock is a difficult task so it’s a good idea to invest in tools that can make things easier for you.
To learn about other features that Mint Service Desk can offer, visit our website.
