System administrators rightly associate problem management with identifying and removing the underlying root causes of incidents. But finding and resolving root causes requires resources and interdepartmental political will that are not always available. Living with a documented yet unresolved problem is not a failure of your team. Nor is it a failure of process. The real failure would be to overlook the smaller, incremental improvements that can be gained by addressing the factors and conditions that contribute to incidents. Make sure that your problem process is focused on outcomes beyond technical solutions to root causes: knowledge gain, effective decision-making, elimination of negative activities such as finger-pointing, and the only metric that really matters in IT—customer satisfaction.
