Problem Management focusses on being proactive to identify and avoid problems that may occur in the IT infrastructure. While Incident management processes are focussed on identifying failures and restoring the services, problem management tries to research and identify the root cause of an existing problems to avoid its re-ocurrence. Problem management also focusses on identifying issues proactively based on trend data available from the system management / service desk.

The key responsibilities of problem management are

* Problem Control [ Identify, Classify, Priority assessment ]
* Error Control [ Identify known errors, Promotion of Fixes, Monitoring and Resolution ]
* Proactive Trend Analysis and Identification
* Problem Reviews [ Lessons Learned or Post Mortem ]
* Reporting and CMDB Updates

A number of reasons I have seen cause failures in the problem management implementation process are the lack of data and resources. A lack of Incident Data, Error Data, Configuration Data etc., creates more issues than in hand due to the change to fix one problem creating another. I have also seen problem management implementations fail due to lack of resources, not having enough resources will keep your problem management team in a reactive mode for ever