Implementing Problem Management

So you have decided to implement Problem Management….

The key question that your leadership is going to ask is “How much will this cost me?” The question that should be asked, or rather how this should be perceived is “how much money can we save or even re-appropriate to other activities?”

This discussion doesn’t come without some research. You really need to be able to determine the return on investment for Problem Management. Depending on the maturity of your organization you may have an easier time determining accurate numbers to provide your leadership team.

The first step in marketing this is for everyone to understand what Problem Management is all about. There may be many perceptions on what it is for but this is the perfect opportunity to showcase what it is meant to accomplish. you will also want to highlight some of the key savings which include:


Now that you know which key stats to start with you need to figure out the cost savings for each. This is where it can get a bit tricky. Depending again on your organizations maturity you may (or may not) have the ability to pull metrics to calculate the dollars and cents.

You will need to know, even if roughly, the labour costs for the support team(s) so you can translate this to a salary/minute. You will also need to know what the cost of the service outages are. this may involve discussions with business units to determine what the service uptime is worth.

Once you have these numbers you should be able to roughly calculate the savings for each of the items above based on what the estimated percentage of Problems generated would be.

Once you have the amount of savings it will be easier to determine (and justify) whether you require a Problem Management person, team, or function.


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