In general, most of us treat Incident Mgmt as reactive while Problem Mgmt as proactive approach. As such there are very little differences between these two modules, especially the fields – most of the fields are available in both the modules barring a few critical.
Workaround, Solution and RCA (Root Cause Analysis) are the critical ones that are usually made available in Problem Mgmt module only. Priority, Impact, Urgency, attachments and other fields are quite common. To get different views, I have had posted my query onto LinkedIn and I got pretty interesting responses from several experts. To an extent, the discussion did get diverted on whether Incident Mgmt is strictly reactive and so is Problem Mgmt proactive.
Well, there were many, who considered Incident Mgmt as proactive too. Their justification was that if the incidents are being repeated or similar incidents are logged, one needs to consider a proactive approach on why so many incidents are being logged. Some expressed that Problem Mgmt can also be considered as reactive since Problem tickets are logged against or by linking Incident tickets. I believe that logging Problem ticket against Incident tickets and linking it may be reactive; however, the objective of logging Problem ticket is to do RCA in order to avoid getting similar incidents logged again/repeated, which is proactive.
Another different point brought in by one of them was to collect expected frequency and re-occurrence of the problems, which could be considered from analytics angle.
Seldom customers/consultants consider a significant difference between these two modules and I suspect if many of them use Problem Mgmt relatively either. However, I would like to get more perspectives from readers too. Thoughts?
