a) Describe in detail the longer term activities of Problem Management.
6 Marks
b) What sources of data will be used, how will this data be gathered and to what purpose will it be put?
7 Marks
c) Explain the difficulties that will be encountered in judging the effectiveness of the longer term Problem Management activities.
7 Marks
- Marking Guidelines
a) Prevention of incidents, both new and repeated. This done by:
- looking at past incidents and removing or avoiding their causes
- analysis of the services and working practices to spot possible new incidents
- keeping PM staff up to date on the services, opportunities of new technology, business working practices etc
- developing and maintaining procedures for dealing with major incidents
- management information - planning, gathering and monitoring
- liaising with other functions, within and outwith ITSM, including software maintenance, applications development, user groups, capacity management, service level management.
one mark for each valid point made
b) What data?
- Incident data, records of what has gone wrong and how it was put right
- capacity and availability records and predictions
- customer satisfaction surveys
- hardware, software and help desk support times and performances
- records of PM’s own performance in identifying and preventing problems
- usage of computer services
- budgets
Suggestion - up to 3 marks for a wide enough range of data
How gathered from
- CMDB/incident logging/tracking software
- capacity Plan and Availability reports
- business plans of the organization and customers
- financial information
Suggestion - up to 2 marks for a wide enough range of sources
Purpose?
- Future prediction
- Evidence to sell solutions to current major incidents
- allocation of resources
Suggestion - up to 2 marks for sensible ideas
c) Hands up all those who aren’t here!
How can you measure the number of incidents that didn’t happen? Evidence can be taken from trend changes in relevant metrics, ie reduction in the number of incidents, higher availability etc. Difficulty is to identify the cause of such changes when every other possible variable is also changing. Perhaps the best way is to do away with a Problem management function and see if things get worse, but this is not sensible. Thus in many ways it requires an act of trust, or at least confidence, and this means that management must understand the basic concepts of ITSM and Problem management if they are to understand why they are spending money on it.
Difficult to allocate marks, I think this is one for examiners’ discretion - has to be marked on how they have responded. But I would advocate Y/z for understanding that there is a real “Catch - 22” type problem and 3½ for what you might do about it.
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