Problem Management

Gordon

I am starting to tinker with the problem management portion of SCSM, and it seems a little lacking. It seems to serve the Incident process very well insofar as it provide workaround, known errors, that kind of stuff, but it stops short of the components I would expect for Problem Management itself.

I would have expected places to record my RCA, my Remediation plan, workflow around perhaps status or SLA when I do those things, etc.

Anyone have any experience of these components within the PM module. Anyone built an MP around that?

Adrian_Paech

Hi Gordon,
I agree it's a little lacking. We are planning on going down the problem management path, but will definitely be adding in some class extensions, such as RCA etc. 
pribably my biggest concern though, is there is no oob ability to use activities with problems. This makes it difficult to delegate sub tasks which relate to remediation of the overarching problem. 

I did read somewhere that it is possible to enable activities to work with problems in the console, but not sure whether this would be doable / supported in the Cireson portal. 

Would also be keen to hear other people's thoughts on this.
Adrian

Tom_Hendricks

Disclaimer:  I have not tried this yet, so take it with appropriate grain(s) of salt...

However, Problems inherit from System.WorkItem, and therefore have the System.WorkItemContainsActivity relationship by inheritance.  So it stands to reason that you could:

1. create a type projection for your Problem form that includes this relationship
2. follow the KB (link not handy, sorry) for custom form relationships, using the GUID for this new type projection in the Admin settings
   
3. edit your custom problem form (also a Cireson KB link for this, also not handy at the moment) to include a tab that contains the Activities control (copy from the Incident form)

There is a giant assumption here that the Activities control will work the same way for Problems as for other work item types simply because it uses the same base class and relationship.  Maybe someone has tried this and knows for certain?

Adam_Dzyacky

Aaron Croasmun on Technet details a way to build out something identically along the lines of what you're suggesting @Tom_Hendricks - although it sounds like a fairly decent undertaking and maintenance for this specific module.

Adrian_Paech

Ok thanks for the info guys.

I will definitely look into this closer to our implementation date of problem management.

Much appreciated.

Adrian