While Incident Management is focused on recovering from outages, Problem Management is used to ensure incidents don't occur in the first place. Problem Management is both reactive, after incidents occur, and proactive, before they happen.

Best intentions aside, problems get away from us. Daily urgencies and the press of 'too much to do' allows us to easily drop the ball. We forget to call the vendor back, to fix the intermittent connection, or to undo temporary fixes. When that happens, sooner or later, another incident occurs - yet again.

Problem management allows you to assign tasks and track problems to their completion. Problems can be entered reactively, from an incident, or proactively. Target dates are assigned to each task so that you can estimate overall completion times and to know if someone is behind schedule. E-mail notifications remind you when you are overdue on tasks.

Samantha's problem tracking and task notification system gives you the edge you need.