Prioritizing Problems - Resource Allocation

[HawaiiITSM]

We are just starting off with Problem Management. To keep the process simple, we had intended to share our Incident prioritization matrix with Problem Management. (Imapct + Urgency). However it became quickly apprent that with 5 Problems of Priorty "1" it would be difficult to discerne which problem to address first. "FIFO" is not an option. How might we further define Problem priority? Some ideas we have had:

1) Number of related incidents
2) Affected system (some systems are more critical than others) but all can cause Priority 1 incidents.
3) Legal/Compliance impact.

If anyone else has struggled with this issue I would appreciate your feeback.

[UKVIKING]

Problem Management records really should not be classified in the same manner as Incidents

The prime reason is that Incidents are linked to Service and the two are linked to the SLA

Instead, the classification for Problem Management should revolve around the context of the problem

For example

Application, system, network, facility
Complete failure, workaround used,
design, functionallity, etc

and of course time

how many resources & time to dedicate to the analysis, etc of the problem

So a PRoblem - 1 - critical - System - Windows - would involve the majority of the time / resources to finding the underlying root cause - to include calls to Microsoft
while a problem 3 - irritating - system - windows - would involve one of the mid level engineers - Windows system - to investigate and may be involve technet etc and trying to replicate

Problem management unlike Incident managemetn is only concerned with the following

1 - find out the cause (unknown)
2 - determine how to resolve the cause once found
3 - choose the 'best' option
4 - test the solution while re-creating the problem(if possible)
5 - request change and deploy to production
6 .//wait// to see if the issue recurrs

Mahalo

From a long time kama'aina far from da kine

[HawaiiITSM]

Howzit John! Mahalo for your response. You are entirely correct. In fact, after some soul searching, I was able to come up with a priority tree that accounts for many of the items you have listed. Thank you for refocusing my thoughts.



Chris

[upbeat]

I am too setting up problem management for my organization. I am concerned about how to manage the amount of raised problems.

How do you manage the length of time a problem is open? I mean a high impact issue, you need to have it fixed asap. Not to have small incremental steps which take months to complete.

And how do you deal with the smaller/minor issues, which get washed away by higher impacting problems, which do not have enough priority to work on. Do you close these after a certain time? Do you have guidelines/agreements for this in place?
The ITIL process flow does not have this option in place. It must be finished. Though, problem tickets which are open for more than 1 year does not hold any value in my opinion. What do you think?

Looking for a few perspectives on prioritization for problem management. Thanks in advance.

[mmmonkeys]

upbeat

ITIL wouldn't tell you anyway because it's a guide for best practices. It will never tell you what to do step for step, word for word, process for process and function for function.

I believe you/your organisation have to come up with the processes required...