Incident Vs Problem Vs Change- Need a simple real time example to understand the flow

PP12
Giga Contributor

Hi,

 

i want to understand the concepts with simple example for:-

  1. What is Incident ? 
  2. What is Problem ?
  3. What is Change ?
  4. How Incident and problem related
  5. what part change plays in solving an incident/problem ?
  6. How can we resolve an incident / problem?

 

 

Thanks .

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Community Alums
Not applicable

Hi,

PFB example to understand the mentioned queries.

Let's suppose you work in an organization, and you are using outlook for connectivity, then you face issue while opening the outlook you are not able to connect to the outlook.

Then you will raise this concern to the related team (who is responsible for outlook).----> Incident

The corresponding team will look into it, and try to fix it. If they don't find any root cause for the incident and if they get multiple incidents for the same underlying cause then the incident will be considered as a problem. They will give you some workaround until the root cause is determined.

If multiple users are facing the same issue with the outlook. ----> Problem

If after investigation, the technical team found that the outlook server requires patching to resolve this issue. the respective team will raise the change request to apply OS patch on the server. ---> Change

 

Hope the above example helps you to understand the concept of the incident, problem, change, and their relationship.

 

Regards,

Priyanka Soni

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

View solution in original post

13 REPLIES 13

Chalan B L
Giga Guru

Hello PP,

Go through the below Videos

Incident Management

Problem Management

Change Management Overview

Change Management Playlist

 

Would recommend these videos.

 

Mark the answer as correct and helpful if it helped you..!!!

 

Regards,

Chalan

 

Niveditha Arula
Mega Expert

Hi,

INCIDENT MANAGEMENT:

An IT organization that follows an ITSM framework should have an incident management process in place. While it is understood that incidents should be discovered and remedied as quickly as possible, IT organizations should also track and analyze incidents as part of a continual improvement process. By understanding which incidents occur most frequently and which cost the business the most, resources – including IT, development, and vendor compliance – can be deployed to have the maximum impact.

 

An incident will typically be caused by one or more problems. Again, various ITSM frameworks have different definitions of problems, but a very nice one comes from Rob England in The ITSM Review where he states, “a problem is in fact the cause of zero or more incidents.” We can certainly understand that a problem can be the cause of one or more incidents – perhaps a piece of hardware failed which generated a service outage. However, England’s definition also allows for the possibility of latent incidents. For example, if a printer ceases to operate outside of business hours it is a problem but not yet an incident since no one is around to attempt to use the printer. Further, the code your developers write may have undiscovered bugs that haven’t yet been triggered and thus comprise a problem that no one is aware of that may or may not lead to an incident in the future.

 

PROBLEM MANAGEMENT:

An IT organization following an ITSM framework should have a problem management process in place. This process will include the discovery of root causes of problems as well as mitigation of those causes. As with incident management, problems should be tracked and analyzed so that commonalities can be discovered. Perhaps a certain brand or model of disk drive has a higher failure rate than others, or a particular IaaS or PaaS vendor is discovered to have difficulty meeting their SLAs on a consistent basis.

 

Problem management can be either reactive or proactive. Reactive management occurs when problems have already caused incidents and steps must be taken to resolve the current incident and prevent future incidents. Proactive management includes solving problems before they are noticed by service users (i.e. before they cause incidents), as well as activities such as auditing code to find bugs.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT:

Change management is the process of making changes to the IT infrastructure in a standardized and systematic manner. Changes can include replacing or upgrading the capacity of hardware, upgrading to a new version or rolling back to an old version of software, or switching to new vendors of IaaS and PaaS solution. Changes can both be a response to problems and incidents as well as causes of them.

 

Many organizations will have a change advisory board that is required to sign off on all changes before they take place. This board will carefully examine the impact of any changes so as to prevent incidents stemming from them. The board may either veto a proposed change or require mitigation measures to be put in place before the change such as standing up a fail-over site.

 

Thank you.

Community Alums
Not applicable

Hi,

PFB example to understand the mentioned queries.

Let's suppose you work in an organization, and you are using outlook for connectivity, then you face issue while opening the outlook you are not able to connect to the outlook.

Then you will raise this concern to the related team (who is responsible for outlook).----> Incident

The corresponding team will look into it, and try to fix it. If they don't find any root cause for the incident and if they get multiple incidents for the same underlying cause then the incident will be considered as a problem. They will give you some workaround until the root cause is determined.

If multiple users are facing the same issue with the outlook. ----> Problem

If after investigation, the technical team found that the outlook server requires patching to resolve this issue. the respective team will raise the change request to apply OS patch on the server. ---> Change

 

Hope the above example helps you to understand the concept of the incident, problem, change, and their relationship.

 

Regards,

Priyanka Soni

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Santosh_Ksagar
Mega Sage
Mega Sage

Example:-

1) Incident :- Let's say your computer has some problem, it's getting restarted after 2-3 hour repeatedly. So you will log an incident. IT team will resolve you problem. After IT team solved your problem your computer works fine. Now one week later you found out that your computer facing same problem again. 

2) Problem:- If some issue is happing repeatedly then it becomes problem. So in problem management we try to find out root cause of that problem.  So in this case, IT team will find root cause of this problem. Now the IT team has found out that computer RAM needs to be replaced.

3) Change:- Whenever we need to change something we have to raise change request. There are mainly three types of change request:-

i) Normal Change: Normal change requests follow a prescriptive process which requires two levels of approval before being implemented, reviewed, and closed.

ii) Standard Change: Pre-approved changes.

iii) Emergency Change: Emergency changes E.g Server Crash

If this has helped you, Mark Correct/Helpful!!!

Regards

Santosh Kshirsagar

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www.dxsherpa.com

 

Trupti6
Tera Expert

Hi,

These are links available on community which gives best practices for incident and change management,

Please have look

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=452e266ddbd0dbc01dcaf3231f9619f1

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=e4edeae9dbd0dbc01dcaf3231f961962

Thanks,

Tripti S.