Some tools allow the user to take an Incident record and “promote” it to a Problem. This is wrong. Remember that the Incidents associated with Problems are used to prioritize Problem investigation. If you promote an Incident into a Problem, then you have lost meaningful information on the number of Incidents associated with the Problem.

If I were designing a Incident/Problem Management system from ground up, the data collected in the Incident record and Problem record would be very different. In the Incident Record I would want the user’s identifying information, description of the user’s experience of the outage, time/date stamps for every update to the record. In the Problem record I would want to know what IT person opened the record, what the technical issues (root cause, CI at fault, etc) are being analyzed. For Problem records I don’t care about the end user contact information at all. That should all be in the associated Incident record(s).