Murphy's law says, “if something can go wrong, it will,” and often it’s just a question of when. When something goes wrong in IT, the first thing people want to know is “What caused this?” Executives ask. Customers ask. The press might even ask.
But if you ask experienced incident responders, that’s not usually the first question on their minds. Why? Because the surface-level answer is rarely helpful. “A config file was overwritten” or “The database had a corrupted entry” doesn’t tell you much about how or why things went sideways in the first place. This is where the practice of problem management steps in. It’s the ITSM practice focused on understanding the deeper, often messier root causes behind incidents. It’s not just treating symptoms, but curing the underlying issues. And it’s one of the most valuable things your IT org can do.
At its core, problem management is all about finding and eliminating the root causes of incidents. While incident management is all about getting things back up and running fast, problem management asks the deeper questions. What allowed that bad change to get through? Why did a known bug resurface? What systems or processes failed along the way?
It’s not about blame. It’s about building systems and practices that keep the same issues from happening again, and improving overall service health in the process.
A lot of teams treat problem management like an afterthought. They deal with incidents as they happen, maybe write up a postmortem if there’s time, and then move on. But that’s a mistake.
Every incident is an opportunity to learn something. And the teams that treat it that way are the ones that start seeing fewer repeat issues, better system reliability, and happier users.
Plus, there’s a financial angle to this. Downtime is expensive. Avoiding just one major incident can easily pay for the time you spend on problem management ten times over.
Problem management doesn’t live in a vacuum. It works best when it’s integrated with other key ITIL practices.
Take incident management, for example. These two are closely tied. In fact, the best teams don’t really treat them as separate workflows. They investigate root causes in parallel with incident response, because the faster you figure out what went wrong, the faster you can build a real fix.
Problem management also pairs well with change management. When a change causes an incident, it’s not just about rolling back. It’s about asking why that change made it through, what validation failed, and what needs to change in your pipeline or approval process to prevent it from happening again.
And then there’s knowledge management. Every time your team uncovers a root cause, develops a workaround, or finds a long-term solution, that knowledge should be shared. Documented insights, especially in the form of known error records, make it easier to resolve similar issues in the future and reduce organizational memory loss.
Even service request management has a tie-in. While incidents and service requests are different, recurring requests can sometimes hint at a deeper problem. If users keep asking for the same fix, that might be a sign that something’s broken in the system, , not just a one-off need.
Problem management doesn’t have to be heavy or bureaucratic. In fact, when it is, it often fails. Some orgs treat it as a separate function entirely, handing it off to a specialized team that never interacts with frontline responders. The result? A backlog full of “problems” that never get resolved.
The better approach is to bring it closer to where the action is, where incidents are happening, where changes are being deployed, where code is being written. Teams should be empowered to detect problems, investigate them, and resolve them in an ongoing loop of improvement.
The process itself is pretty straightforward: spot potential problems early, identify the root cause, prioritize them based on business impact, investigate thoroughly, document what you find, implement workarounds if needed, and, when you can, close the loop by fixing the root cause entirely.
That fix might take time. It might involve collaboration across dev, ops, and security. But the result is a stronger, more resilient system.
The most effective teams don’t wait for a major incident to start thinking about root causes. They bake problem management into their everyday work. During calm periods, those blessed windows between high-severity incidents, they’re looking for trends, analyzing past data, and digging into nagging issues that haven’t caused major outages yet, but easily could.
They also know there’s rarely just one root cause. Incidents are complex. Blaming a single person or system is lazy. The best teams practice blameless postmortems and look at all the contributing factors. They use frameworks like the “5 Whys” to get past surface-level explanations and find the real story behind an incident.
And when they find it? They share it. Openly. Across teams. Because the goal isn’t just to fix your problem, it’s to help the entire org learn and improve.
Problem management isn’t a project with a start and end date. It’s a continuous cycle of learning, adapting, and improving. Even the most mature IT teams still experience incidents. The difference is how they respond, and how they grow from each one.
The goal isn’t zero incidents. That’s unrealistic. The goal is fewer repeat incidents, faster recovery, and better service with every iteration.
To make that happen, you’ll need more than good intentions. You’ll need ITSM tools that let you link problems to incidents, track follow-ups, prioritize based on impact, and capture lessons learned. You’ll need leadership that supports the time and space for investigation. And you’ll need a culture that values curiosity over blame.
At the end of the day, problem management is about more than just fixing things. It’s about building better systems, ones that breaks less often, recover faster, and improve continuously.
So next time an incident strikes, don’t just ask “What broke?” Ask “Why did it break, and what can we learn from it?” That mindset shift is what separates reactive teams from proactive ones, and keeps your services running smoother in the long run.