Problem Management Process
- Patrick H
- Nishant Kumar
What is a Problem?
A Problem is a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents raised by our customers. A problem cannot be quantified in terms of effort and hence does not have any SLA. It typically requires a more intensive deep dive by the engineering team resulting in one of the following outcomes:
A bug fix which is rolled out with an upcoming or emergency release.
A third party related bug which is outside the scope of Vivi to fix.
A known issue which we have been unable to fix after exhausting avenues to fix or has been deemed too resource intensive with limited ROI.
Where is my Problem ticket and has it been prioritized?
Problems are related to incidents, but it is important to differentiate them in the way they are managed:
Incidents have an impact on users or business processes and must be resolved so that normal business activity can take place.
Problems are the causes of a collection of incidents therefore they require investigation and analysis to identify the causes, develop workarounds, and recommend longer-term resolution. This reduces the number and impact of future incidents.
The problem tickets for the organization can be found on Vivi Central in ‘Support’ section. All problems are evaluated and prioritized periodically on following criteria:
How widespread is this issue?
How frequently/rarely the affected functionality is used by our customers?
How complex is the issue to resolve?
Is there a workaround for the issue?
The problem tickets are transitioned from one state to another once they have been reviewed and analysed.
What are the different statuses of a Problem?
Workflow of a Problem ticket:
Status | Description |
|---|---|
AWAITING REVIEW | Once a problem ticket is identified, it is moved to ‘AWAITING REVIEW’ status for the engineering team to perform a preliminary analysis. |
PENDING THIRD PARTY | After the first review by the engineering team, if the problem source is identified to be with a third-party organization, outside the scope of Vivi, it is moved to ‘PENDING THIRD PARTY’. |
IN REVIEW | If the engineering team determines that the problem requires a dedicated resource to investigate the root cause and possible solutions in their preliminary review, the problem ticket is moved to ‘IN REVIEW’. The product owner makes a call regarding prioritizing the problem based on severity and other parameters. |
IN PROGRESS | Once an issue has been prioritized for further investigation and a likely resolution, it is moved to IN PROGRESS state. |
KNOWN ISSUE | Problems which are deemed to be unfixable in the short term and are likely to exist in our backlog for a long time are moved to ‘KNOWN ISSUE’ status. Updates are provided on these problems only once they are re-prioritized again. |
CLOSED | When a problem has been resolved during internal testing and/or as stated by the customer it is moved to ‘CLOSED’ state. |
If you need to contact Vivi about a problem ticket, you can either respond on the ticket or to reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Customer Problem SLAs
We will be observing the following SLAs as a part of our customer problem management.
If the ticket remains on “Awaiting Review” with engineering team, the ticket status will be updated in a fortnight after further discussion and analysis by the engineering team.
Subsequently, an update will be sent out when there is any progress achieved towards problem resolution.
For problems in “Pending Third Party”, “Known Issue”, or “Closed” status, there will be no regular updates unless there is a change in status owing to new discovery on the topic.