RCA: misunderstood or even a complete stranger

I’ve been working on IT for about 8 years now, always as a member of support teams (except for a couple of years, when I, just me, was the “support team”). Through the last 2 years, beyond the mega-hype of ITIL as a magic recipe to turn IT shops into perfect machines (as if that was enough) one of the most used expressions for selling and buying IT services has been “continual improvement”.

On January 2008 I joined a support team of 5 people, where I played the systems administrator role; the customer was a private holding who bought to my company a managed service pack, including the adoption of a few ITIL v2 processes: incident, problem and change management.

I had never known, through my years of experience in the IT field,  nothing like problem management, whose goal is finding the  underlying root cause of major or recurring incidents and then raise a request for a change (of the infrastructure, the operations procedures or documentation or whatever) to permanently eliminate that cause and so prevent the recurrence of such incidents.

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