Apr 24, 2017 8:25 AM
Replying to Edward Daniels
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Risk Management is a strategy employed to deal with "known unknowns and unknown unknowns" and I love saying that phrase. I won't go into the textbook definition of risks at this point, we all know what it entails.
Known risks to a project or operations is generally referred to as known unknowns because we don't know if they will happen but the possibility is there. Unknown unknowns are risks that we have no idea that they exist. Risk management is how companies deal with known / unknown risks and their action plan to mitigate. Depending on the encoutered risks, they can choose to accept, exploit, transfer or accept the risk.
Incident and Problem Management are more operations-based than project-related. ITIL helps explain incident and problem management. I will explain as an IT Manager.
Incident management is "is a term describing the activities of an organization to identify, analyze, and correct hazards to prevent a future re-occurrence". So when employees have issues with their computers, they call or email the helpdesk for help in resolving the incident. Example of incident include "i can't log in to my computer or i forgot my password".
Problem Management is the "process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems. The primary objectives of problem management are to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening, to eliminate recurring incidents, and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented".
Now if multiple employees call about the same incident (for example, we cannot connect to the internet), the helpdesk would consider these incidents as a problem and use their problem management process to resolve it.
Both incident and problem management have different goals to an organization. Incident management aims to "get us quickly back to work"which, may involve a workaround of sorts. But Problem management is more like "let's find the root cause of these incidents and fix it, so we eliminate reccurence and minimize incident impact".
