An organisation has more open problems than it can analyse. What does the problem management practice say about how to proceed?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail hard
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The options
Not correct Problems should be prioritised in the same order as the incidents that revealed them
Incident priority reflects urgency of restoring one occurrence. Problem priority reflects the ongoing risk from the cause, which may be quite different — a low-priority incident can reveal a high-risk problem.
Not correct Every identified problem must be analysed and resolved before any new problem is accepted
There is no such rule, and it would be unworkable. Problem management is a risk-based activity, not an obligation to clear a queue.
Correct Problems should be prioritised for analysis based on the risk they pose, and it is accepted that not all problems will be resolved
Correct. Problem control prioritises analysis by risk, and the practice explicitly accepts that some problems are not worth resolving and are instead managed as known errors with workarounds.
Not correct Unanalysed problems should be closed and reopened only if further incidents occur
Closing a problem that is still causing risk loses the record and the trend evidence. The practice deprioritises rather than discards.
Why
Problem management is explicitly economic. Analysis capacity is finite, so problems are ranked by risk, and the possible outcomes include leaving a problem unresolved as a documented known error when a permanent fix would cost more than the incidents it prevents.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- Which statement best describes what the incident management practice is intended to achieve? machine-checked
- How is an incident defined in ITIL? machine-checked
- Several incidents are open at once and the support team must decide which to work on first. On what basis should the order be decided? machine-checked
- A difficult incident is worked on by pulling several specialists from different teams into the same session at the same time; once it becomes clear who is best placed to continue, the others step away. What is this technique called? machine-checked
- Why does an organisation define a separate procedure for major incidents rather than handling them exactly like all other incidents? machine-checked
- A support team routinely fixes incidents by phone and updates the incident record only with the word 'fixed'. What is the most significant consequence of this? machine-checked