Service Desk Manager's Snacks - How to Determine Priority

This is a snack of information about Service Desk Management. Today's snack has to do with prioritizing issues using an ITIL concept of combining impact and urgency to determine priority. One of the core responsibilities as a Service Desk Manager is determining priority of incoming tickets. We all know our customers well. Their problem is the only we need to be looking at, regardless of who else has problems, right? How do you appropriately determine the priority of the issues coming into your ticketing system? I handle this using a combination of two questions. What is the impact? And what is urgency? Together these two fields create the priority. Our customers may not like what it translates into, but that is how we are able to determine where to allocate resources.

So what does impact and urgency mean? What values should you apply to them that makes sense in your environment? How do these really help me determine the priority? Glad you asked. Impact has to do with effect on the customer's ability to perform their job function. Some of the values I typically use for impact are individual, department, building, site, and company wide. Each of these values help me identify the number of resources I can most likely expect to spend on the issue. I typically use none, normal, medium, high, and critical for urgency. Each of these values help me identify the level at which I should respond. Together they tell me how many resources I should expect to use to resolve and work on the issue as well as what quickness do I need to respond.

To create the priority I create a matrix of priority results based on impact and urgency. The combination of impact plus urgency equals priority. I have created an example of what a matrix might look like using the values I provided of Impact and Urgency and making up my own values for priority.

As you can see from the matrix we have an appropriate priority based on the combination of impact and urgency. This design may not fit within your organization or processes so you may have to modify portions of it. The goal of this snack is to help you efficiently prioritize the tickets coming into your service desk so as to keep costs lower resulting in a direct impact on the Service Desk's ability to respond appropriately to the issues it receives. Keeping costs lower through efficient staffing as a result of effective prioritization has a direct and positive impact to the company's bottom line.

I implement service desk and infrastructure management software in many organizations across the country. Part of my job to is to help those organizations improve their service desk processes. This is one of the greatest impacts I see with my customers. They are able to implement it quickly and see immediate results.