Problem and Root Cause Management Maturity Assessment

About this assessment

Problem management exists to stop incidents from happening again. When it works, recurring incidents disappear, service desk agents resolve calls in minutes using proven workarounds, and the organization spots weaknesses before users feel them. When it does not, the same outages repeat, problem tickets age in a queue nobody reviews, and every root cause review ends with the same vague action to "monitor the situation".

This assessment follows the full problem lifecycle in nine domains: the policy, roles, record standards and priority scheme that govern the practice; the triggers and triage that decide which problems are worked, including faults in AI-enabled services; the investigation method, including blameless reviews, change correlation and rules for AI-assisted analysis; the known error database and the workarounds it gives incident staff; how permanent fixes are chosen, raised as changes, applied safely by automation or AI agents, verified and closed; the skills, capacity and supplier support investigations depend on; the aging, escalation and reporting that keep problems moving; proactive analysis, including AI-assisted pattern detection, that finds problems before incidents occur; and the measures that prove incident reduction.

Each question is scored on three dimensions: Documented, Implemented and Effective. This exposes practices that exist on paper but not in daily work, work that happens but is never written down, and practices that run but are never measured. The model tests the hand-offs with incident, change, configuration and knowledge management and with AI governance, while the depth of those practices stays in their own assessments.