Problem management looks beyond restoring service to understand recurring causes, control known errors and prevent repeat incidents.

Key points

  • Group related incidents and examine patterns across time
  • Separate symptoms (what users felt) from causes (what actually broke)
  • Track corrective action through controlled change and verified closure

Illustrative example

Illustrative example — for teaching clarity, not a SkillsNCR outcome claim.

Repeat pipeline incidents (illustrative):

Week 1: sales_daily fails after a late source schema change.
Week 3: same job fails after another unannounced column rename.
Week 5: partial load succeeds but revenue is understated—same upstream team, different column.

Restore-now each time: rerun or patch the mapping.
Problem investigation: no contract or automated schema check between source and warehouse.
Miniature RCA outline:
- Symptom: intermittent sales_daily failures / wrong totals
- Timeline: three related events in five weeks
- Cause hypothesis: breaking source changes without consumer notification or validation
- Corrective change: add schema contract test in CI; alert on column drift; agree a change window with the source owner
- Verification: deliberately introduce a safe test drift in staging and confirm the alert fires before production

How WorkReady practises this

Associates produce an RCA that another person can challenge, reproduce and act upon—not a narrative that only the author understands.

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