Ticket priority in Incident Management

Impact is a measure of the effect of an incident, problem, or change on business processes. Impact is often based on how service levels will be affected.

Urgency is a measure of how long it will be until an incident, problem, or change has a significant business impact. For example, a high impact incident may have low urgency if the impact will not affect the business until the end of the financial year.

Priority is a category that identifies the relative importance of an incident, problem, or change. Priority is based on impact and urgency, and it identifies required times for actions to be taken. Impact and urgency are used to assign priority.

The Impact and Urgency combine to affect the Priority in Incident Management. For the Priority value to align with the needs of your organization, administrators must configure the incident priority and weight ranges.

When configuring Service Desk, the system administrator assigns numerical weights to each Impact category and each Urgency level.

When the person creating the incident ticket selects the Impact and the Urgency level for an incident, Incident Management adds the numerical weights together to calculate the Priority, such as Critical.

For example, consider the following system, which is configured as described below:

• The Impact category of Significant / Large is configured with a weight value of 5.
• The Impact category of Minor / Localized is configured with a weight value 1.
• The Urgency level of "Critical" is configured with a weight value of 20.
• The Priority of "Critical" is assigned to any combination of Impact and Urgency that equals 25.

In this system, any time that an incident ticket is created with an Impact of Significant / Large and an Urgency of Critical, the system automatically assigns the Priority of Critical, because the combined weight of Impact and Urgency equals 25. If, however, an incident ticket is created with an Impact of Minor / Localized and an Urgency of Critical, the Priority is not set to Critical, because the combined value of Impact and Urgency is 21. In this case, the Priority assigned to the incident depends on how the administrator configured the system to assign a Priority based on a calculated value of 21.