An incident vs a problem

In the next article in his series on getting to grip with IT in your school, Neil Limbrick looks at how the two categories that cover the majority of day-to-day work that will be handled by the service desk

Read the full article below or on page 30 in our April magazine

In previous articles I have talked about the ten areas that make up the IT operation in your school and highlighted the benefits and basic requirements of having a service desk as a single point of contact and the place where people can go to make requests. However, recording those requests is obviously just the beginning. 

• Service desk
• Incident management
• Problem management
• Change management
• Configuration management
• Release management
• Availability and capacity management
• Service level management
• Service continuity management
• Financial management

These requests could fall into one of a number of categories – and understanding those different categories – and how they relate to each – other is key. The two categories that cover the majority of day-to-day work that will be handled by the service desk are:

• Incident management.
• Problem management.

The aim of incident management is to restore service to the end-user as quickly as possible – sometimes this may involve some sort of quick fix and other times a permanent solution may be achieved. An incident is often referred to using terminology like ‘a fault’ or ‘an error’ – but, as far as the end-user is concerned, it is simply when something is not working as it should.

Problem management is different from incident management in that the main goal is to get to the bottom of what is causing the incident and find the best resolution. A problem could be a wider occurrence of the same issue, often affecting a wider number of users or, alternatively, it could involve an underlying problem that has only been identified by some form of routine analysis rather than because a user has reported it.

Often these two areas can be in conflict with each other – as solving, and getting to the root of a problem, may mean extended investigation, delaying the resolution. It is also important to separate resolving the incident from solving the problem – resolving the incident is about getting the user back up-and-running quickly, even if that means a temporary workaround.

This is where schools can run into problems if systems are not properly maintained and tracked. Too often technicians’ focus is on resolving incidents – particularly if their performance is managed by the number of tickets they close. Resolving incidents, but not solving the underlying problem, can overload a technical support team, resulting in lots of extra tickets being raised and then closed. 

Having the wrong measures in place could give the appearance of a successful department – but the reality could actually be a department that cannot see the wood for the trees because they are focused on individual incidents and are failing to see the underlying problem that needs to be resolved. 

If this situation is allowed to continue then more and problems can occur as a result and, ultimately, this could lead to a complete failure of computer systems.

Make sure that incident management and problem management are firmly in the vocabulary of both your service desk teams and your senior leadership team. Have reporting mechanisms in place that help support the identification and resolution of problems, and not just the more apparent issues.

For a lot more information about implementing incident management take a look at the EdFITS framework on EdTech Central – https://edtechcentral.uk/framework/