PROACTIVE PROBLEM MANAGEMENT
It is clearly better for any organisation to prevent incidents occurring rather than waiting for them to occur and then committing resource to fixing them, often repetitively over time. This is the basic principle of quality assurance, as opposed to quality control, and it is not only better for the business and its users but also more efficient for IT. Problem management is therefore one of the most important processes in helping reduce the amount of time IT staff spend ‘fire fighting’, particularly for second and third line teams whose primary role is project-related improvement work and for whom reacting to incidents is an unwanted interruption.
In operating proactively, problem management often works closely with both the availability management process and continual service improvement since each of these aspects has similar objectives, namely to protect the IT environment from disruption and improve services wherever it is cost-effective to do so.
Proactive activities can include analysing trends associated with historic incidents to identify and eliminate underlying infrastructure or application weaknesses. Proactive work may be initiated from a service improvement plan that has been created perhaps in response to poor performance or simply from a wish to improve performance, for instance in a competitive situation to gain an advantage over another service provider.