What do you use for your problem management solutions?

N2IT

I'm looking at an organization that is basically driving the car without a dashboard and are in desperate need of a problem management set of processes.

Any publications out there and that discusses this holistically. ITIL has it's points, but I am finding it way to theory and not very applicable to specific environments.

I am looking to capturing incidents and clustering them into potential problems. Any ideas

Discuss

paul78

It depends on the size of the organization. In larger organizations where I've worked, we've used solutions like Remedy, HP OpenView ServiceManager, and even Salesforce case management. Salesforce actually may be a decent solution since a SaaS may be more appealing as implementation is less burdensome.

From a process perspective - ITIL's incident management and problem management processes actually work well. That's the one that I'm more familiar with. From a metrics and data analytics perspective, you could couple Six Sigma to see if the processes are increasing quality. One key metric is making sure that from your problem reviews, if you are assigning followup preventative actions, those actions need to be tracked to make sure that they occur and that it has impact on reducing repeatable incidents.

pumbaa_g

Various methods can be used depending on what are your requirements
Pareto
Ishikawa
Kepner & Tergoe
Chronological Analysis
Pain Value Analysis
The list goes on...
What you are trying to do, as per your post is to undertake Proactive Problem Management. For this you need the list of incidents for a period of 6 months and then you need to start sorting them to see if you can identify any trends. Thats the basic start, let me know if you need any help