Will An Incident Become A Problem?

I have often come across discussions and queries regarding when an incident would become a problem. Interestingly, I have found that some of my co-consultants and many practitioners of ITIL, despite being ITIL certified at various levels themselves, provide various reasons for the same. Some of the ‘so called’ conditions when an incident would become a problem are:-

• When there is a major incident
• When the incident approaches SLA breach time
• Business impact of incident is very high
• Etc.

The fact is an incident never becomes a problem.

In generic terminology or layman’s language, incidents are referred to as problems. But such explanations are not expected from an ITIL certified individual.

Let us see how ITIL defines incident and problem:

• ITIL defines incident as an unplanned interruption to an IT service or a reduction in the quality of an IT service.
• ITIL defines problem as unknown cause of one or more incidents.

Let us take an example to understand difference between the two – Your PC hanged and that happened quite frequently. Every time you rebooted your PC, it started working fine. Eventually, you called the support team. They checked your PC and installed a patch. Thereafter, your PC never hanged.

The condition when your PC hanged was an incident. You resolved that incident by rebooting it. It was a workaround. Finally, when the support team checked your PC, they did a root cause analysis. It was a problem. They provided resolution to this problem by installing the patch.