Houston we have a Problem...

Baton down the hatches, keep your wits about you, the Problem Manager is back in town and he wants answers....ok he actually wants solutions, but you get the idea.

So what’s the problem with Problem Management?

Resource!!!

Yes we all pain to admit, but it’s true, the Problem Manager is a lone ranger in many respects, he is the outlaw who wants to lay down the law. Soooooooooooooo when do we really have a Problem?
In IT a Problem record would need to be raised after an incident or three are logged which are of similar or familiar type. Many little incidents resulting from one big whopper problem and the ‘problem’ is only where the headache begins.

Let’s recap....some mini whirlwind occurred, incident logged, restoration to service complete and incident closed....problem record created and now the lone ranger wants to know WHY.
Day to day our IT staff feel their work here is done. All is well, production is up why all the fuss? Do we really have to spend additional man hours looking into something that may never occur again, or in fact not be avoidable due to some ‘what ever’ reason?

The hard core honest answer, it depends! Ha I hear you cry, that is not a real answer. But it is! It depends on the benefit that creating a role to look into past related issues and root cause analysis brings. Is it worth the outlay, do we want to spend the money, the additional hours and effort to find the meaning of a 10 minute downtime to production. I tell you now, it depends on if that 10 minutes cost you $10 million or $10.00, and how important that lose is to the survival of your company.

I feel that the lone ranger has been given a raw deal, as most Problem managers are in fact gloried Incident and documentation junkies who never really get to make the impact that can be so beneficial to the company.

Is Problem management essential to a company? Yes, maybe not in the purest more officialised form. But whether we document it or not, if we admit it or pretend we don’t, we all can and will be a Problem manager at one time or another, so spare a thought to the lone ranger who wants a bit of your time. It might end up freeing your time up at a later stage.

Over and out!