Understanding ITIL Key Process Relationships

Home Source: http://www.computereconomics.com/article.cfm?id=1074

Robert Boyd a Contributing Research Analyst for Computer Economics. He explains the processes relationship on Incident, Problem and Change. ITIL is divided into three major areas: Service Support, Service Delivery, and Security Management. Understanding the differences between those area and the relationships among, these processes is an important first step in implementing ITIL. He takes an example to explain the process relationship on Incident Management and Problem Management. The objective of Incident Management in Service Support category is to restore service as quickly as possible. Therefore, an incident is active until service is verified as restored. The objective of Problem Management in Service Support category is to minimize the economic impact of service disruption by diagnosing the root causes of incidents, gathering information on known errors and by providing work-arounds, temporary fixes, and permanent fixes.

While an incident is active only until service is restored, a problem continues to be active until appropriate fixing solution are published and implemented. This means that incidents and problems are not synonymous. Neither do incidents become problems. Rather incidents, problems, and changes each have a many-to-many relationship with the other two. It is also important to note that not all problem requests are created because of an incident. Some problem requests are initiated by proactive problem control discovering a likely cause of future incidents.

In case, an instance of a problem may have no related instance of an incident. The problem may initiate a change request to implement a permanent fix. In another case, the incident control activity of the Problem Management process may discover that multiple incidents have the same root cause and link all these incidents to a single instance of a problem. Another incident may implement a temporary-fix created previously by the problem control activity of Problem Management.

These relationships can become quite intricate. During the training phase it is easily getting confusion about the relationships between incidents, problems, and changes. Support personnel do not have to know every possible permutation of these relationships, but they should understand that incidents, problems, and changes are not synonymous and can have quite complex interactions.

In my opinion, I strongly agree Robert Boyd's explanation on the relationship between Incident Management, Problem Management and Change Management is important during ITIL implementation. These complex relationships are not easily to the detriment and clearly define instances of incidents and problems. If audiences confuse on those processes, the ITIL implementation will have more pressures.