Decoding Proactive Problem Management

What it can do for an overall efficiency of IT Infrastructure landscape by working with stakeholders like development teams and other business units

- Tapan Kumar Sahoo

During the course of my career, I have had series of discussions with various stake holders about the worth of Proactive Problem Management, but I still find the existence of confusion and disagreement regarding the activities involved in the process. To make things little clearer, let’s start with defining what Proactive Problem Management (PPM) is and take the discussion further as to how this can add value to the organization in up keeping its critical business applications available for the end users.

This paper is for those who intend to implement Problem Management Process based on the ITIl principles or seeking an introduction to Problem Management.

Here we are going to discuss about how Proactive Problem Management is different from its counterpart reactive problem management. What it can do for an overall efficiency of IT Infrastructure landscape by working with stakeholders like development teams and other business units.

In this composition, I tried to outline a set of activities that make up the practice of Proactive Problem Management and the benefits that it can bring rather than waiting for the reactive Problem Management situation.

Problem Management (PM) is one of the 5 processes in the ITIl Service operations volume. This process is responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems that happen or could happen in IT environment. Here, for this discussion, we emphasize on two approaches -

Through reactive approach, we focus on identifying the underlying root cause of the incidents (disruption to the services) as they occur. It has two primary goals:

a) Prevent incidents from reoccurring

b) Minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented

However, in Proactive approach, focus is on correlating the trends with the existing KeDB and KMDB thereby preventing the incidents to occur. This is part of the most critical ITIl v3 Continual Service Improvement (CSI) volume.