Non-priority problems

What do you do with problems that aren't fixed but which the business never prioritise for fixing?

The other week a client of mine was expressing his frustration with his team for having too many open Problem records. Now, the Problems that were causing the worry weren't the ones they were currently working to resolve, but rather a backlog of Problems that were just not important enough to spend any time on. He was inclined to close them, seemingly because they were making his stats look bad.

So I picked on one, as an example, to explore further whether it would be valid to close it or not. It turns out this example was a bona-fide problem whereby the service was not performing to the customer's expectations, and may not have actually been performing to spec, but the Business kept on refusing to allow the resources to be allocated to fixing it. You see, the Business had their roadmap outlined with all the changes they wanted to see, naturally justified with business cases, and they did not want to add any risk to delivering their roadmap by including fixes to these Problems which aren't really losing them any significant money. Don't get me wrong: that's a perfectly good business decision, but the pain was being felt by this Operations manager who gets to keep these black marks against his SLA stats, when in truth he is not empowered to resolve them.

It's clear to me this has to go one of two ways: (1) move the hot potato to the party that has the power to resolve it; or (2) make it a cold potato.

If your processes treat Problem records as hot potatoes, i.e. it is a bad thing to be in posession of these, particularly for extended periods of time, then you need to be able to allocate them to the party that's blocking progress. In this case, this may be the business owner, whether they have access to the Problem management system or not.

The alternative is to stop them being hot potatoes. Allow the Problem record to be moved to a status where it is no longer a black mark on the SLA reporting, e.g. "on hold", or promote to a Known Error record. You then need a process to review those with the Business from time to time, so that they can then prioritise them for fixing at some point.

By simply closing the Problem record, you are denying yourself the opportunity to use your Problem Management tool as a knowledge base. If you've closed the Problem, it looks like the problem no longer exists, so the next time an Incident is raised, your operations team treats it as a new problem, which is a huge waste of resources.

How do you treat these kinds of Problems in your organisation?