Problem Management activities will result in a decrease in the number of incidents by creating structural solutions for errors in the infrastructure or provide Incident Management with information to circumvent these errors to minimise loss of service.

Although the standard process has both reactive and proactive aspects, the accent in problem management is on incident prevention (proactive). The reactive aspect is concerned with solving problems in response to one or more incidents. Proactive Problem Management focuses on the prevention of incidents by identifying and solving problems before incidents occur. There is a strong parallel with 'preventive maintenance'.

The goal of Problem Management and Incident Management can be in direct conflict; both processes aim to restore an unavailable or affected service to the customer. The Incident Management function‟s primary goal is to restore this service as quickly as possible whereas the speed with which a resolution for the Problem is found, is only of secondary importance to the Problem Management process. Investigation of the underlying cause of the Problem is the main aim of the Problem Management process.

Although we have defined a problem management process for CERN, support for it is currently not implemented in the tool. Introducing the problem management process before a certain maturity is achieved in the area of incident management has a high chance of resulting in confusion. For this reason we have not pushed hard for the implementation of problem management. It is however something that can be rolled out relatively easily if the need is there.