Problem Management
[updated: June 5, 2020]
Process Owner: John Barber
ServiceNow Problem Management Overview
Overview
Problem management is responsible for further investigate the underlying cause of one or more incidents. The main goals of problem management are to:
- provide a mechanism to understand the cause and permanently solve incidents that have occurred where the incident process may have only identified a temporary solution purely to restore service
- prevent incidents and service impacts from occurring or to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented
User Impact
Frontline IT support specialists along with second and third tier support will be involved in the root cause analysis of incidents and will also help to determine the workaround or resolution for the problem. Teams or individuals responding to the problem will be expected to contribute to known error articles so that problems are documented thoroughly for any future reference.
Further, problem resolution and elimination of root cause often calls for applying a change to the configuration item in the existing IT environment, so users who are involved in the Change Management process or performing the change itself will also be impacted.
Timelines & Activities
What's Happening/Up Next?
- Finalizing dates for testing, UAT, and deployment
Recent Milestones
- Provided demos to stakeholders in Office of the Registrar, the Centre for Teaching in Learning, as well IT team meetings
Past Activities
May 2020
- Provided demos to stakeholders in Office of the Registrar, the Centre for Teaching in Learning, as well IT team meetings
April 2020
- Identified major roles required for Problem Management
March 2020
- Completed sprint, including development & process definition [Mar. 26, 2020]
February 2020
Problem Management User Story Summary
Below is a summary of our desired outcomes for our initial Problem Management sprint. You can view the detailed user story here.
- Ability to create new problem records from:
- Problem application
- Incident Application
- Ability to create 'Known Error' articles from a Problem record
- Ensure that all fields on the problem form are read-only once the record is closed so that the integrity of the problem record is maintained
- Enable customer visible comments and internal support only comments fields
- Employ the auto-resolution of related incidents when the parent problem is resolved
- Provide workarounds for open Incidents for which the problem is raised so that users are aware that there is a workaround for the issue
- Communicate fix for open Incidents for which the problem is raised so that users are aware that there is a solution to the problem
- Divide a problem into multiple problem tasks so that tasks can easily be assigned to different assignment groups or users to work on
- View graphical representation of PM reports in the Problem Overview dashboard
- Ability to prioritize problem records so that support teams can handle problem tickets appropriately
October 2019
[Oct. 2019] Representatives from SuMO and ServiceNow were on-site demonstrating the out-of-the-box capabilities of each ServiceNow component to key stakeholders across Sheridan. As a prerequisite to these demos, the process owners for each component were asked to create and submit their user stories, outlining the:
- current state of operations
- challenges faced
- desired outcomes for implementation
Discussions regarding best-practices, and how ServiceNow can be best used to align to Sheridan's practices were integral parts of these workshops.
Workshop Participants: Stuart Tenn, Chris Adams, Chris Des, Diane (TBD), Kevin McDermott, Brian Smith
