As CMMI Consultants, if you come across the situation wherein you have to differentiate between Incident and Problem, how will you do this? Essentially, as CMMI Consultants, do we essentially know the Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP) Process Area?

CMMI FAQ 0

23rd April, 2015

So to begin lets understand first

What is an Incident?

Incidents are issues or events that if not addressed may lead to service disruptions and failure. Generally incidents are related to the Service Delivery. Hence we need to address incidents in a time bound and effective manner as per service agreement.

What is a Problem?

On the other hand a problem is the root cause of one or more incident. So, one or more incidents, having common symptoms, are attached to a problem.

Difference between incident and problem

To understand the difference between an incident and problem let us take few examples.

An incident could include a Website that is down during normal operating hours, a lift that is stuck etc. Whereas a problem could be the underlying root cause behind the problem. For example in case of website it could be the issue with the Internet Connectivity of the web server, or in case of lift it could be the issue with the electric line burning due to excessive heat.

So to resolve incidents one could use the alternatives available. For example alternate internet connection to web server or alternate electric connection could be used to resolved incidents individually.

But for permanent and better treatment and to avoid future incidents we need to treat the underlying causes or the problems causing the incidents. For this we can conduct the root cause analysis of the incidents to find out the cause (problem) behind these incidents and then resolve those causes to permanent treatment of the problem.

CMMI Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP) Process Area

Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP) is the methodology to manage near-misses or nearly non-conforming situations from a root-cause analysis perspective both from transactional and organizational perspectives.

IRP Process Area helps in the management of incidents as well as causes behind the incidents. In the Specific Goal – “SG 3 Analyze and Address Causes and Impacts of Selected Incidents”, CMMI Model has provide the Specific Practices to focus on the

• Analysis of selected incidents
• Establishing solutions to respond to future incidents
• Establishing and applying solutions to reduce incident occurrence

Above SG and SPs shows that CMMI has focused on the treatment of the incidents and problems as well.