Outage Review by Problem Management

Problem managers have access to a special requests view in the Records console. This is the “Requests for Problem Identification” view. If you are a problem manager and you open this view, you get a list of completed requests that are related to a service for which you are the problem manager and which may need your attention.

This view excludes requests with the completion reason “Solved – Root Cause Analysis Not Required”. This makes perfect sense, but feedback from problem managers has convinced us that an exception had to be made for top-impact requests.

A top-impact request represents a service outage. Service outages should be rare occurrences. It is understandable that a problem manager would want to review each outage, regardless of the value that was selected in the Completion reason field. So from now on, problem managers can review each service outage in the “Requests for Problem Identification” view to make absolutely sure it will not recur.

If the problem manager sees that the root cause was removed when the outage was resolved, then the Reviewed button can be pressed to remove the request from the “Requests for Problem Identification” view. On the other hand, if the problem manager wants more to be done to prevent recurrence, the “Relate to New Problem…” option can be selected from the Actions menu. This opens a new problem, fills out most of the fields and links the request to it.