CHALLENGES
Incident management focuses on restoring service as quickly as possible while problem management is concerned with ascertaining and removing the root cause of one or more incidents.
The two processes work closely together. However, there can at times be a
tension between the incident management and problem management processes.
Often the problem investigation and diagnosis phase can be time-consuming. If
incident management has a quick workaround to restore service, they will want to use it. This may not aid problem management which needs to understand the root cause. Problem management may require an outage or to take a ‘dump’ of data which again may be at odds with incident management striving to get the service back running as soon as possible.