Problem or Incident

[Rut]

Hello there,

From what Ive gathered, the problem vs incident discussion is ongoing everywhere itil is used. I work for a relatively large IT-company that implements itil and we use First -, Second -, Third - line support and then Problem.

Historically, the people on the Problem department has been the go-to people where Support tickets come when the other parts escalate their issues if they didnt have the time/resources/knowledge to solve them.

This is sort of living on even though we implemented itil, so we created the third-line support to handle it.


Our problem at the moment is that the incident department and the problem department has different views on what a problem is.

On the incident side, they argue that a fault that requres a root-cause analysis to stop multiple incidents from coming up is a problem.

On the problem side, they argue that a specific item which isnt "indicative of a single error" isnt a problem, because the fix cannot be made available for the specific configuration item, only the specific computer.


According to incidents definition, a faulty harddrive would be a problem. Incident can resolve the incident because they can reboot the computer and get it to work.

According to problems definition, replacing a harddrive isnt a correction of our it-infrastructure, only solving a specific incident.


ITIL gets vaguer and vaguer with every new version, but is Root Cause Analysis Problem-specific in V3? Im going crazy trying to figure out a good definition of a problem in order to shuttle the right tickets into thirdline.

[BorisBear]

Hi Rut

Unbelievable........almost your entire post is wrong.

This is a new low for this forum - well done

[UKVIKING]

Rut

Yuo are not using ITIL definitions in the break down of your teams

Incident and problem definitions in ITIL are very clearly defined

the ITIL v3 glossary PDF has the exact wording but here is the crux

Incident - any 'happening' where the service being deliveried is not delivered as agreed/

Problem - an unknown root cause of one or more incidents (reactive); an current configuration where this is potential of a service incident (proactive)

Single points of failures are good proactive problems.

Beyond that ,BorisBear nailed it sghut
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

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

[Diarmid]

Whenever there is a dispute whether something is an incident or a problem, then at least one of the disputants does not know what they are talking about.
_________________
"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

[Boydness]

[rickstevens]