IT Service Management and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) - Problem Management
The University of Utah is working to improve IT Service Management by following structures documented in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL principles are a framework of “Best Practices” in which to run the IT department. We choose which principles and practices to implement and how far we will put them into our department. ITIL is a journey of always improving what we do.
A few weeks ago Steve Penfold sent a message about Incident Management (IM). This 2nd educational message is about Problem Management (PM). The goal of PM is defined as “minimizing both the number and severity of Incidents and Problems; working to reduce the adverse impact of those incidents and problems which are caused by errors and to prevent recurrences of incidents related to these errors.”
Quick review: Incident Management “fixes it quick” and gets the user back to work. Problem Management “fixes it forever.”
Let’s look at an example: Problem 2009-010 -- In October of 2009, users in Clinic 6 use IHC’s EMR Program “Help 2” which is IP restricted to be accessible from the hospital network only. The clinic purchased new laptops and connected wirelessly, the wireless IP range is different than the wired network and users had no access. Incident Management processes (the Help Desk) had the users connect via the IE available in Citrix. Users were working again but the problem wasn’t resolved. Problem Management (Joe Bernhard in this case), worked with IHC’s IT group and the UIT Network team to build additional routing mechanisms so users coming through any of the “Bi-Hosp” routers (hospital network, including wireless), can now access Help 2. In this situation, Incident Management got the users back to work quickly, and problem management resolved the underlying problem preventing future incidents and the need for extra steps by users in the clinic.
Most problems are identified by trends in Incident metrics. In the case above one of the employees on the Help Desk noticed the trend and let the Problem Manger know about the issue and work began to resolve it. Any IT employee can ask for any issue to be reviewed as a problem however. We will work to identify the root cause of the issue and assist in documenting the fix, give leadership update reports on the status of the problem and work to keep some of the administrative duties off the shoulders of the employees working to fix the issues. Just send us an e-mail and we’ll start from there.
A dashboard all the current problems, resolved problems, and known errors at UIT is available on the Wiki site at:
https://wiki.it.utah.edu/confluence/display/ITPM/IT+Problem+Management+Dashboard (it does require you to login).
Over the next few months we will be sending additional education messages to help UIT and ITS understand the ITIL processes that our team manages. We welcome you to visit our website, http://itil.it.utah.edu , so you may learn more about ITIL and how we are incorporating it into our IT department. If you click on the @UIT link for each area you will see how we are applying ITIL here at the U.