A few months ago we published an article called ‘The Problem with Problem Management’, focusing on the big challenge around the difficulty of getting exec buy-in and ultimately budget and commitment to support a Problem Management initiative (or ongoing service).
Let’s face it, whilst any Service Management practitioner or savvy IT Director or CIO understands what Problem Management is and the important (essential!) benefits that it can deliver, it is still often pretty hard to justify in terms of a Return on Investment. i.e. how many Incidents and Major Incidents we may be able to prevent, the number of automation opportunities we may (or may not) discover and ultimately, how much money will we save. As such, all too often, it gets pushed to the bottom of the stack as ‘we’re too busy’, ‘we cant afford it’ and so on.
The real question for me here, is how can you afford not to do it?
Let’s have a think about this shall we. What are we too busy doing? Usually Projects, Incidents and Major Incidents (which cost businesses across the globe huge sums of money day in and day out).
Projects - of course these come and go and they can feel as important as incidents themselves sometimes, but of course the classic mistake with projects, is using all of your BAU resource to run and take part in them, with little thought for back-fill. Service drops because we cant afford to do the basics; i.e. Incidents and Problems. The classic ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ scenario. (ooooh I feel a projects blog brewing!).
And then there’s Incidents – ahhhh, those pesky things that take up the vast majority of time for the IT teams in most organisations. “We’re all so busy doing incidents and we’ve been up all night running an MI”, “of course we haven’t got time for Problem Management this week”… WHAAAT??!
Let’s say that again.. “we’re too busy working on Incidents to work on Problem Management…” i.e. the very thing that prevents or reduces Incidents in the first place?!
This is nuts right? But this is happening all day every day, with nowhere near enough effort on the very thing that saves us time and money – Problem Management, because ‘everyone’s busy’, or it's ‘too expensive’ and unfortunately we see this time and time again.
A big consideration is sometimes that organisations simply don’t need, or find it very difficult to justify a full time Problem Manager, whether that’s a perm FTE, or a full time contractor for X months to drive an initiative, as it ‘costs too much’ or ‘we haven’t budgeted for it’.
We of course need to consider that it’s not just about having a Problem Manager to design and run a robust Problem Management process, but it has to be supported and prioritised by appropriate technical resources also and this is critical to the success of Problem Management, to ensure that it’s not just a paper pushing exercise.
So even if you can ‘afford it,’ a lot of the time the Problem Manager wont be fully utilised due to other people’s availability to attend workshops, calls etc, so it’s yet another blocker and again, cant be justified.
For all the reasons laid out in this article, we recently launched ‘Problem Management as a Service’, or ‘thin slice’ Problem Management. Where we design and provide a robust Problem Management policy and process for you and run the process as a ‘thin slice’ of an FTE. So this can be as little as half a day per week, up to a full time burst of activity for a few months, or as an ongoing service (and being completely flexible along the way to scale up and down dependent on the need) in order to help keep you laser focused on Incident prevention and being proactive, rather than purely reactive.
We offer the same ‘thin slice’ solutions for Continual Service Improvement and Change Management.
If this article resonates with you and you’re keen to explore our ‘thin slice’ Problem Management as a Service or other ITSM services further, please reach out for a chat on here, or via email on hello@ITSMPeople.co.uk
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