Applied Process Mining Techniques for Incident and Problem Management

The incident and problem management process forms an essential part in every organization. Since businesses rely heavily on IT, each outage, issue or user service request should be dealt with as quickly as possible in order to minimize its impact on operations. For Volvo IT Belgium, we analyzed the event log file of an incident and problem management system called VINST, in order to objectively verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the underlying process. Our analysis was performed by means of a of a combination of process mining and data mining techniques and tools, including Disco, ProM, Minitab and MS Excel. The log file itself consisted of 65.533 incident records and 6.660 problem records. As part of the exercise, we investigated aspects, such as total resolution times of tickets, actual resolution process being followed, ping-pong behavior between the different helpdesk lines, differences between distinct support teams etc. Finally, we also made recommendations to improve the current process and increase integration between incident and problem management.