Incident fix/closure codes

[fandango]

Incident fix/closure codes

I suspect that the answer to this question may read something like "depends on the information requirements of your organisation". From my ITIL novice perspective, a given incident may have a symptom, a root cause and a fix. Is there a hard and fast ITIL guideline for whether a closure code reflects a root cause or fix? In my organisation closure codes can reflect either. For example, let us imagine the following incident:

Symptom: Slow responses from server
Root Cause: File System 98% full. Archive file housekeeping not up to date
Fix: Perform housekeeping on archived files

Now, there exists the following two combinations of closure codes:

Combination 1

Code 1: Server
Code 2: Operating System
Code 3: File system full

Combination 2

Code 1: Server
Code 2: Operating System
Code 3: Housekeeping

Combination 1 reflects the root cause and Combination 2 refelcts the fix. Now, which combination will be provide the most useful management information? I suppose it may be useful to know how many File System Full instances there have been and how many issues have been solved by housekeeping.

To summarise my questions are:

1) Is there a rigid ITIL guideline for whether a closure code reflects a root cause or fix?
2) Or, is there a model or set of guidelines that can offer guideance to those designing closure codes and/or for service desk analysts closing off incidents?

[itilimp]

Welcome to the black art that is categorisation. Although there is a little guidance in the ITIL books on this (and I mean a little!) I think most people on this forum would agree that it isn't quite right and needs to be services based. There are some other threads on this forum if you have a search, although they mainly deal with opening call categories rather than closure.

As for root or fix, it depends on what is most important to you and whether you are doing this to feed into problem management or not. Do you want to be able to say we had x number of calls where the root cause was y or we performed x number of fixes of type z? Personally I'd imagine the former as this would help inform problem management which root cause needs time allocated to eliminating it.

[Oz]

Hopefully one can eliminate the root cause after all isn't that the idea ???
But that would not eliminate the house keeping.
So the answer would be root cause and once the root cause is eliminated you wont get any more calls because the house keeping is being done.
_________________
Oz

[ITILbit]

Is there a comon list of possible closure or resolution codes that can be used?

Surely a generic list for a general IT infrstructure should exist somewhere?

[UKVIKING]

no and dont call us shirley

we are surly, surely you knew that
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter