ronutz

The Roles · Who runs it

Problem manager

Written from published sources

The person who asks why the same incident keeps happening. Incident management restores the service; problem management identifies the cause and manages what follows from it. The framework gives the vocabulary precisely: a problem is a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents; a known error is a problem whose cause is understood while a permanent fix is outstanding; a workaround is what people use meanwhile.

What the day looks like

  • Reading incident records for the pattern, which is the identification phase and the one most easily skipped.
  • Investigating causes across systems owned by teams who each see one part.
  • Documenting a known error, which delivers value even where the fix is far away or uneconomic.
  • Managing workarounds so the same one is applied the same way by everybody.
  • Working proactively: looking for the causes of incidents that have yet to occur.

What it answers for

  • Recurring incidents having a record that explains them.
  • Known errors documented with their workarounds, and reachable by the people who need them.
  • Causes pursued to a decision, including the decision to accept one.

What it is measured on

  • Recurrence: the same incident arriving fewer times.
  • Known errors documented, and workarounds in use.
  • Problems closed with a permanent fix rather than with a workaround.

Who it receives from

Incident management and the service desk
The record, and the pattern hiding inside it.
Engineering and vendors
The explanation of a defect, and the release that resolves it.
Change enablement
What was altered, which is where a proportion of causes live.

Who it serves

Everybody handling incidents
Fewer of them, and a documented answer for the ones that remain.
Users
The interruption that stops arriving every Monday.
Management
Evidence of which underlying faults are costing the most.

Who else has a stake

  • The teams whose systems a cause turns out to sit in.
  • Vendors, whose defect this frequently becomes.
  • Finance, since a permanent fix competes for budget with new work.

What it takes

  • Analysis across boundaries, since a cause rarely respects a team's edges.
  • Patience with an investigation whose value arrives after it closes.
  • Writing a known error clearly enough to be usable by somebody under time pressure.
  • Diplomacy, because the finding usually names a team rather than a machine.

What the job turns on

The people best at this work are the people incident management needs most, and only one of those two has a clock on it. That is a structural fact rather than a cultural failing: an incident has a customer waiting and a problem has a spreadsheet, so the resource moves toward the incident every time it is asked to choose. Organisations that get value here protect the time explicitly, and treat a documented known error as a delivered outcome rather than as an investigation that stalled.

The published sources

Where it leads

Roles that lead here

The work itself

The Practice covers how this work is done — triage, escalation, evidence, handover — across the whole corpus.

Read The Practice