ITIL "Jobs"

[paul544]

First let me say that these forums look to be a blessing for the ITIL community.

My question is, should Incident/Problem/Error management be split up between several people for clarity's sake? Volume aside, is there benefit to keeping these things under different people, or could one person do it all?

[Gav]

Just so you dont confuse yourself; 'error management' isn't really a pure ITIL term; Error Control is an activity done by Problem Management

Therefore we should be talking about the 2 processes in your question: Incident and Problem Management.

In theory Incident and Problem Management should be different people as each function goals can conflict.

ie. Incident Managements primary concern is to restore services as quickly as possible; wheras Problem Management needs to understand the root cause of the problem and is more interested in a 'solution' rather than a 'workaround'.

However...in the real world this is often impractical to split the role normally due to tight resourcing, so the trick is to have someone that understands the differences between problem and incident management enough for both functions to work without conflict.

[paul544]

Great points. Thanks