You have a Major Incident which goes right through the Incident lifecycle but try as they might the techy guys cannot find out what is causing it or how to fix it. A Problem record is created for the issue and PM are making steady progress on it. PM are 99% sure they have found the root cause but the fix is still some time away.
What would be the correct process if before the fix has been implemented user’s call and want to raise a new Incident for this issue? There is definitely no workaround that can be implemented in the meantime.
My thought is to run it through the Incident lifecycle in case this occurrence is caused by something else, and if not close it and link it to the Problem record. Does this sound correct?
In a perfect world, you would leave the Incidents open and linked to the Problem record. Then the ticketing tool would auto-magically close all the linked, open Incident records when the Problem goes to a Resolved state. This would allow the users to know that the issue is still being addressed if they call in requesting a status. Otherwise you will have the Service Desk reporting that the Incident is resolved (and perhaps have automated notifications to the users indicating that the Incident is resolved) when the Incident is still open.
Another option is to have the Incident in a Pending Problem Resolution status.
Either way, you should not resolve the Incident because you might need to run a report against the data to determine all unresolved Incidents associated with the Problem record.
Let’s say that you develop a workaround a week after the Incidents start being reported. You could apply the workaround to subsequent Incidents to resolve them as they are reported. You would still need to query the database for any unresolved Incidents to address the users who reported the issue before the workaround was developed.
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