What is the aim of problem management?

Whereas incident management aims to find the shortest path to restoring normal service, problem management aims to find the underlying causes of an incident, and the best way to resolve and prevent them. When incidents occur, the incident response team restores normal service as quickly as possible, without necessarily identifying or resolving the underlying cause of the incident. If incidents occur rarely or have little impact, assigning resources to perform root cause analysis is difficult to justify. However, if a major service outage incident or a series of repeated incidents cause significant impact, the problem management team investigates the underlying cause of the incidents, and identifies the best method to eliminate the root cause.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) distinguishes between incidents and problems. Incident management serves to quickly restore services or broken experiences. Problem management seeks to prevent incidents from happening again.

An ITIL problem management workflow aims to investigate, record, and prevent IT infrastructure problems. The IT service project template comes with a built-in workflow for handling problems. We recommend you start with the template's default workflow and adapt it to your business needs.