Problem Management aims to resolve the root causes of incidents and thus to minimize the adverse impact of incidents and problems on business that are caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors. A problem is an unknown underlying cause of one or more incidents, and a known error is a problem that is successfully diagnosed and for which either a workaround or a permanent resolution has been identified.
The Problem Management process deals with the outcomes of Event, Incident, and Change Management. Its priority is to establish workarounds to minimize the impact of Incidents, and then to reduce the occurrence of the Incidents by systematically eliminating the causes. Problem Management feeds into Knowledge and Change Management with known errors and Requests for Change (RFC).