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What Are The Differences between Incident
Management and Problem Management?
There's sometimes
considered to manifest
as a conflict of interest
between Problem
Management and
Incident Management, which I have discussed this
briefly in other posts. Problem Management is mostly
about uncovering the right answer. It is a qualitative
method of Problem solving, taking considered decisions
to recognize and eradicate the root cause of an issue.
Incident Management is naturally a quantitative
approach, which is certainly focusing on speed.
Incidents should be resolved as speedily as possible,
which frequently leads to quick decision making to
restore service. While on the surface the two processes
align rather effectively. Now that the Incident is resolved
the Problem begins to investigate root cause. However
there are obvious conflicts of interest between Incident
and Problem Management.
Incident Management is concerned with speed. This
truly is understandable due to the fact the incident is
having current impact to clients. Incident Management
really don't have time period to take considered

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decisions. They usually have to make quick ones. The
Email service has gone down. Technical Support
believes the issue is most definitely a corrupt database,
which needs a restore from backup and shall take 8
hours.
Tech Support estimates that it is 95% almost certainly
going to will be the resolving action. There is however a
5% chance that it is actually a memory issue while a
simple reboot of the application servers will resolve the
impact, that will just take 10 minutes. This action will
however delete all diagnostic logs.
Incident Management decide to did the reboot then a
database backup or run both actions in parallel.
Currently being a Problem Manager You can empathise
with their decision, whichever way it is not great news
for Problem Management as now there are without any
diagnostic logs to identify why the database became
corrupt to begin with.
One other example, the sales application is inaccessible
to customers and Tech Support suggests that the issue
is produced by a memory leak inside the application
servers. To restore service technical support
recommends to Incident Management to reboot the
application servers. Tech Support suggests that it can
take 10 minutes to reboot the servers. The reboot will

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delete all diagnostic logs, nonetheless they can possibly
be downloaded prior to the reboots, which will add on an
additional thirty minutes towards the restoration time.
In this particular scenario the response is influenced by
the Incident manager since this is somewhat subjective.
Many will require the instant reboot, will most probably
have an appreciation with regards to diagnostic logs and
immediately take action to retain them. It truly is
interesting to discuss this point with Incident
Management to understand their viewpoint. I also
sometimes ask the question if you wouldn't retain the
logs in the above example how quickly would they
should be retained (i.e. only 5 minutes added to the
duration of the impact) to make sure you to download
them? I think this often makes for an interesting debate.
I have never found a working example of a formula for
this decision. It would be useful to have something
thought as the real driver for the incident management
team is to restore service quickly. They don't get any
praise for retaining logs when they have had an extra 30
minutes of service disruption. If the incident was getting
close to SLA (their Service Level Agreement) the
decision would also change, which again does not feel
like the correct approach. The driver should be to add
the utmost value to the customer or get the best return
on investment (ROI). In the above example the

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investment is time and the return would be Problem
Management identifying the cause to avoid further
recurrences.
In reality it is not as easy a call as a simple return on
investment calculation (effort vs. reward). There are so
many variables to think about and experience is usually
the best way to get the desired result. Incident
Management come under similar pressures from
Problem Management in regards to recurrences. In my
opinion most people don't know Problem Management
exists and believe that the Incident Management team
fixes all issues and the action taken by them stops it
from happening again. An Incident fix to the customer is
naturally a root cause fix rather than a reboot. They live
in sweet naivety. The more the customer knows about IT
infrastructure the more they appreciate the complexity
but also the more they recurring impacts and will explore
the ways to dissolve themselves from responsibility.
A choice to retain logs takes two major variables into
account; the current impact & the chance of recurrence.
How do Problem Management and Incident
Management Interact with one another? Considering the
above it seems like an effort to imagine Incident
Management and Problem Management working well
together as their drivers are frequently at cross
purposes.

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Close collaboration and an extremely close working
relationship are necessary, as although the processes
often diverge at key sections they will be mutually
counting on one another. Problem Management places
confidence in quality information to be retained during
the Incident. Incident Management depend on Problem
Management to eradicate the root causes to avoid
recurrences and thus creates new incidents that Incident
Management need to manage. They additionally have a
common goal of improving the experience of the
customer, although I find this difficult to instil in people,
self interest is less complicated for people to relate with.
Problem Manager's Key performance indicators (KPIs)
drive an unsuitable behaviour as seen in the examples
above. I want to talk further on KPIs and Problem
Management metrics in a different post (soon). With
KPIs that do not strictly align to a real goal, it is crucial to
understand the mutual benefit that the majority of these
processes have on each other and be able to articulate
the benefit of taking a particular action. Incident
Management is a completely different mindset to
Problem Management you could use a school example
and say Incident Management are the jocks, they get all
the praise for restoring service and are always in the
limelight. Problem Management are the geeks, in the
background working away saving the organisation

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millions, without the business ever knowing it. Close
working relationships can break any barrier. It is vital
toward the success of the two processes with regards to
an Incident and Problem Managers to get a good
working relationship.
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