Problem Management attempts to minimize the negative impact of incidents on the business and promotes root cause analysis to identify permanent solutions moving forwards.
Detection
Trend analysis is the key to identifying trouble areas and honing in on specific problems. By plotting trends and tracking the increase or decrease in incident occurrence and time spent you can take steps to avoid or minimize the problem earlier rather than later. Revelation’s Trend Report generator gives you the data you need to identify areas of concern before they grow into full scale problems. Drilling down into the detail, you can find common patterns of failure and focus on the area or service that needs attention or improvement.
Logging
Accurately logging problems and associating them with the relevant incident or incidents is critical. Revelation’s parent/child incident system allows you to create a problem ticket and associate any number of relevant incidents. The built in ‘current problems’ list will help you avoid creating duplicate problems.
Categorization
Properly categorizing problems is essential to avoid ambiguities that may arise from problem descriptions. Revelation provides up to four levels of problem categorization (the same as with incidents) which helps keep the problem focused technicians at the same level of understanding as the Incident technicians.
Prioritization
Prioritization helps technicians identify critical problems that need to be addressed. By defining the priority based on the overall impact and relative urgency of the incident you can normalize impact it has on the organization as a whole. Revelation lets you assign priorities manually or automatically. You can also define up to nine priorities in each priority set and can have unlimited priority sets.
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Manual Prioritization - Each major category of problem can have its own set of priorities so your staff will only need to choose from the appropriate priorities for that type.
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Automatic Prioritization - Through the use of default priority settings per problem category and problem templates, Revelation will auto-assign the appropriate priority to new problems. If needed – this automatic assignment can be overridden. Revelation will log this change with a time/date/name stamp in the problem history.
Investigation & Diagnosis
Problem investigation results in getting at the root cause of the problem and initiating actions to resume or restore the failed service. It is important to analyze the impact, root cause and symptoms of the problem prior to providing a problem resolution. Make an announcement with the problem symptoms to avoid the creation of multiple incidents.
Solution
The successful diagnosis of a root cause results in changing the problem to a Known-Error, outlining a workaround, and containing the knowledge within the knowledgebase so future problems can be resolved quickly and efficiently. Revelation helpdesk assists in categorizing these solutions in the built in knowledgebase. By setting the visibility to ‘all’ you can provide your end-users direct access to these articles which will in turn help them resolve the incidents by themselves and reduce the future inflow of new incidents. There is also a benefit in lowering the overall incident resolution time by your technicians in the future.
Closure
Problem closure confirms that all aspects of the original incident or incidents are addressed to the user satisfaction. Revelation helpdesk includes the end user in the process by enabling them to confirm resolution with a date/time/name stamp in the problem history via the self service portal.