Problem and Known-Error Management

By the end

What you'll build

• Raise a problem record from incident patterns and justify why it deserves investigation time
• Apply structured analysis to separate symptom, contributing factor and cause
• Document a known error with a tested workaround the service desk can follow
• Prioritise problems by recurring cost and risk rather than by who is asking loudest
• Close a problem with evidence that the cause is removed or the risk knowingly accepted

Curriculum

What's inside

6 modules · 36 lessons

1. 01

   Problems, incidents and known errors

   6 lessons
   • Restoring service versus removing the cause
   • What actually qualifies as a problem
   • Reactive and proactive problem work
   • The known error record and its lifecycle
   • Problem control and error control as separate activities
   • + 1 more lesson
2. 02

   Finding problems worth solving

   6 lessons
   • Reading incident data for patterns rather than anecdotes
   • Recurrence, cost and risk as selection criteria
   • Trend signals from monitoring and from the desk
   • Reviewing near misses before they become outages
   • Building the case for investigation time
   • + 1 more lesson
3. 03

   Analysis techniques

   7 lessons
   • Choosing an analysis technique that fits the evidence you have
   • Timeline building and change correlation
   • Five whys, and where it quietly misleads
   • Cause-and-effect mapping
   • Testing a hypothesis in a safe environment
   • + 2 more lessons
4. 04

   Workarounds and knowledge

   6 lessons
   • Writing a workaround the desk can follow at three in the morning
   • Testing a workaround before publishing it
   • Versioning and retiring workarounds
   • Linking known errors to live incident records
   • Measuring whether a workaround is working
   • + 1 more lesson
5. 05

   Resolution, acceptance and closure

   6 lessons
   • Permanent fix, accepted risk or deferred: making the call explicit
   • Raising a change to remove the cause
   • Recording accepted risk with an owner and a review date
   • Verifying that the cause is genuinely gone
   • Reporting problem outcomes to stakeholders
   • + 1 more lesson
6. 06

   Practice and check

   5 lessons
   • Situation to next movematch pairs
   • From recurring fault to closed problemsequence order
   • The words that decide what happens nextfill blank
   • Eleven failures in six weeksscenario
   • Course quizquiz

The shape of it

How this course works