Incident or problem?

[Adilsonbn]

I have a question. An incident occurred today at the company where the UPS failed and shut down all servers. It was only necessary to restart the UPS to return to normal. I treated only as an isolated incident and not as a problem, because I know the root of the problem. Am I correct? I appreciate the help of colleagues.

[Diarmid]

Do you know why the UPS failed?
How likely is it to occur again?
What was the business cost of the failure, including service management costs?
If it happens again, what might the cost be?
How confident are you of your previous answers?

If your answers are:
yes
very unlikely
not much
not much
very

...then you probably don't have a Problem worth raising.
_________________
"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[Adilsonbn]

Friend,

Thank you for this tip, including, I believe that I can apply in other situations.

Hugs

[MBU]

"WHY" is the killer-question for incidents.
If you can't answer the "why" you may have a problem management candidate on which the Problem Manager/Anlyst can decide to move it to a Problem.
_________________
Michael B.

"I can't say it'll be better if it changes, but I can say it has to change to be good"
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

[Diarmid]

Michael,

I don't like to put too much emphasis on any one aspect. Especially when there are so many "rote Itilers" about nowadays.

Of course there are very few circumstances in which lack of the answer to "why?" should not lead to further investigation. But knowing why is far from enough to decide against raising a Problem. If you know why and you also know that it won't happen again, then you can relax. Otherwise you need to look further.

If you want a "killer" question then it ought to be "what is the risk?" Hence my combination of questions.

If there is measurable risk, then you have a problem until you have determined where the cost/risk balance lies and implemented whatever actions are required to achieve this optimum outcome.
_________________
"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[Anticlue]

Hi,

I agree with Diarmid on addressing the why of the situation while understanding the risk. One item to consider is that the impact is monetary impact plus value based impacts. During the outage, did this affect the business's customers. Did customers lose confidence in the brand?

Hope this helps,
Elyse
_________________
Collaboration is the key to success!