Problem Management

The Problem Management is the process responsible for managing lifecycle of all problems. The general purpose is to prevent incidents and to minimize the influence of those that cannot be prevented.

SimpleOne Problem Management supports the incident management process. The system can:

log incidents;
classify them by impact and urgency, categories and services;
assign them to appropriate persons or groups;
perform functional or hierarchical escalation if necessary;
resolve incidents.

Here is a brief process description based on the state model.

Problem Identification

detect, create a problem desciprtion...detection

Problem Categorization and Prioritization

Problem Investigation

Diagnosis and Resolution

Produce a workaround

Problem and Error Control

Problem Resolving

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Problem Closure

Incident Management State Model

The states can be divided on the State Flow and Waiting statuses. The difference is that when the incident in the State Flow state (for example, In Progress), its SLA indicators are continuing to count down the time related to the incident processing. For example, it can be the time until the SLA breached (the Business Time Left indicator). But when the incident is moved to the Waiting status (for example, Information Needed), all SLA indicators related to the incident are stopping the countdown.

State	Description
Registered	The incident is recorded (via phone/email/Self-Service Portal) but not yet categorized.
Assigned	The incident is categorized and assigned to a relevant person or group.
In Progress	The person started working on the issue.
Postponed	The incident can be marked Postponed if the incident resolving should be postponed for a known period. If the incident moves to this status, then planned resolving date must be specified in the Resubmission field. But if the incident affects business functions, then it must have at least a temporary workaround.
Known Error
Completed	An incident is considered resolved when an agent has come up with a temporary workaround or with a permanent solution for this issue. In this case, he/she must change the status to Completed so that the caller could perform the tests. If the tests are successful, then the incident should be marked as Closed; otherwise, it should be marked as Rejected by User.
Closed	After the incident caller is satisfied with the incident solution, he/she could close the incident (mark it as Closed and (optionally) evaluate the agent performance by grading "Agent Satisfaction" and "Service Satisfaction"). If the incident was not closed after it was marked as Completed, then it can be closed automatically over an adjustable timeframe.

Only the incident caller has the right to close the incidents; this is the best ITSM practice. But in SimpleOne, this rule does not affect infrastructure incidents. The incidents of this type can be closed only by the responsible person after performing the tests.

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