Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's The problem review
So you have got the service back.Well done and dependant of how bad it was it time to either thank the techies or if they were useless, thank your problem manager!
But the job is not over. Now problem management move into the investigation phase which normally takes one of two courses, but before we go into those I want to talk about the output – the Major Problem Report (MPR) The purpose of the MPR is to fulfil the following requirements:
1. Describe what went wrong
2. Describe what was done to fix it (normally a chronology of events)
3. Describe the reason for the fault
4. Illustrate the impact
5. Review the way the service breach was managed
6. Provide a list of recommendations to stop it happening again
The MPR is normally distributed to anyone who was involved with the outage and can also be sent to any other party with a vested interest including any person who has an acton allocated to them. Within our team, we operate a policy of a review period. We normally commit to having the MPR created and distributed within 2 working days of the service restoration and then allow people 3 working days from the point we publish it to ask any questions, query the contents or challenge any of the recommendations (especially if they are allocated to them!)
So what are the two courses we talked about earlier ? Well dependent on the size of the problem it can either be a straight forward creation of the MPR from the notes taken during the outage or a more formal Major Problem Review.
1) MPR created from notes:
Hopefully during the management of the outage, the problem manager would have taken loads of notes including the majority of his emotional outburst, rants and general comments about members of the resolver team’s who have got on his nerves! It should be clearly noted that these should not be included in the MPR........
What is included is all of the good stuff incuding the chronology and the creation of the MPR can sometimes be as simple as lifting all of these note and putting them into a single report. You tend to find that as you are re-writing these notes out the action section starts to form itself as the actions jump out of the page and hit you clearly between the eyes. I usually finish the report with a final read through to see if an new actions spring to mind
2) MPR created via a Major Problem Review:
If the outage has been particularly disruptive or it was difficult to get to a service restoration, it is sometimes beneficial to pull together a Major Problem review. In its simplest terms it is a meeting AFTER the restoration which is facilitated by the problem manager. The notes and chronology of the outage are walked through in great detail to ensure they are a true representation, but also to get down to a lower level of investigation that wasn't possible during the incident. These events are usually needed when you have had to deal with a number of suppliers / resolvers that have not worked well together so expect fireworks! The benefit of getting such a group together after the event is that in the cold light of day when you play back the chronology some of the obvious mistakes jump out straight away whilst others take a bit of teasing.
I have never not gained benefit from a Major Problem Review and when used correctly can be a great use of time and resource.
Throughout this topic I have referred to Major Problem Reports and Major Problem Reviews etc. You may find whilst trawling other ITIL sites that these are sometimes cited as “Major Incident Reports” and Major Incident Reviews. Don’t worry, they are one and the same. It is quite a debate when you get a group of ITIL people together as an Incident is normally related to a low impact/single user breach of service and therefore using them for major outages does not seem right……..anyway, it gives us something to talk about !!
If you would like to see a template of a MPR or a completed version please contact us
26th Feb 2009
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