Call it ‘opportunity’ not ‘problem’

One of the core practices in ITIL, an Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) framework, is ‘Problem Management’, where we identify root causes of breakdowns and fix them, or manage workarounds and known errors. In order to reduce the number and severity of service interruptions, or incidents, it is very important to investigate each thoroughly, find the root cause and fix it permanently across the enterprise. However, the name is not representative of the value of this work. No one wants to report that they have recorded a lot more ‘problems’ this month, or that so many ‘problems’ are outstanding. Senior management doesn’t want to hear about problems, they want us to find solutions.

Hence my appeal to all of you who build ITSM tools and create the next version of the framework: rename this practice to ‘opportunity management’. This more accurately describes what this practice really helps us do: find the opportunities for improvement from what goes awry. These could be incidents created when something broke, or the times when a change was being implemented and went wrong. It could also be when a design review shows us an improvement opportunity, or a vendor gives us a better configuration setting for the product we are using. In each case we are investigating an opportunity that will help us serve our customers better, and get a win for the product or service we provide.

Pursuing these opportunities and fixing the underlying causes for the interruptions should be the primary goal of IT development and operations teams. Analogous to test-driven development, this identification and fix of the causes of real or possible service interruptions means better customer satisfaction, as well as less wasted effort. Repeatedly resolving incidents, redoing the failed business process flows and apologizing to customers is a waste of valuable time and resources. Instead, we need to identify opportunities and spend most of our effort on them.

Let’s all do a search and replace in our decks, metrics, tools and practice names, replace ‘problem’ with ‘opportunity’. For all his brilliance, Shakespeare did get it wrong after all, the name does matter.