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The activities described so far in Problem and error control are mainly reactive. Proactive Problem Management activities are concerned with identifying and resolving Problems and Known Errors before Incidents occur, thus minimising the adverse impact on the service and business-related costs.
Problem prevention ranges from prevention of individual Problems, such as repeated difficulties with a particular feature of a system, through to strategic decisions. The latter may require major expenditure to implement, such as investment in a better network. Problem prevention also includes information being given to Customers that obviates the need to ask for assistance in the future. Analysis focuses on providing recommendations on improvements for the Problem solvers, e.g. provision of online technical tools may reduce the time taken to resolve Problems, thereby reducing the length of time that calls are outstanding.
The main activities within proactive Problem Management processes are trend analysis and the targeting of preventive action.
Incident and Problem analysis reports provide information for proactive measures to improve service quality. The objective is to identify 'fragile' components of an IT infrastructure and investigate the reasons for the fragility - in this context 'fragility' is proportional to the impact to the business should the CI fail.
Incident and Problem analysis can identify:
Categorisation of Incidents and Problems and creative analysis may reveal trends and lead to the identification of specific (potential) Problem areas that need further investigation. For instance, analysis may indicate that Incidents related to the usability of recently installed client-server systems is the Problem area that has the most growth in terms of negative impact on business.
Analysis - for example of events from System Management tools, literature, conferences and feedback from User groups - can also reveal possible Problems deserving further investigation. Organising workshops with prominent Customers or conducting Customer surveys can also lead to the identification of trends and (potential) Problem areas.
Analysis of Problem Management data may reveal:
Trend analysis can lead to the identification of faults in the IT infrastructure, which can then be analysed and corrected as described in the Problem and error control sections. Trend analysis can also lead to the identification of general Problem areas needing more support attention. It should be possible to make meaningful comparisons by expressing this in terms of financial cost to the organisation.
In order to direct scarce resources for Service Support most effectively (i.e. to gain the most business benefit from it), it is worthwhile investigating which Problem areas are taking up most support attention. This is typically a task for proactive Problem Management. In order to be able to estimate the business-related impact of Incidents in a specific Problem area, it can prove useful to introduce the concept of the 'pain factor' of Incidents as a measure. With this concept, a pain value is given to each Incident category on the basis of a formula, taking into account, for instance:
This approach avoids concentrating effort on a group of Incidents, that may be relatively large in number but do not cause a high impact on the level of service provided, instead indicating that it may be more profitable to investigate a small number of Incidents, that are having a very high impact on the business of the organisation.
After the Problem areas that need most attention have been identified, Problem Management should initiate appropriate actions. These may include:
The following points are worthy of particular note:
On completion of the resolution of every major Problem, Problem Management should complete a major Problem review. The appropriate people involved in the resolution should be called to the review to determine:
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