At the beginning of any Service Engagement, it is vital to ascertain a realistic view of all threats (internal and external) that are expected to impact the overall success of the Service Engagement. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the Engagement Manager to obtain all information related to issues that was documented during the sales process and the initiation of the Service Engagement to create an initial set of Service Engagement issues.

By doing this, the ServiceEngagement Manager should be able to improve the overall quality of further assessments for the initial Service Engagement issues, which in turn allows for the development of effective action plans that will resolve the issues before they can seriously impact the Service Engagement.

The Engagement Manager is also responsible for determining what information will be needed to populate the selected Issue Management tool. At this stage in the Service Engagement, any issues that are identified should be documented in an understandable way in the initial Service Engagement issue log before they can be assessed.