Creating and managing priorities

Priorities help technicians rate the importance of records and decide the precedence in which the records must be resolved. You can configure priorities to manage your records logically and effectively based on the organization's needs. The expected due date, expected fix date, and expected response date of a record are calculated based on the priority of a record.

Using Priority hierarchy, you can set an order of precedence for the Category, Requestor, Location, and Department modules. Based on the priority hierarchy that is configured for a group, a record is assigned a priority. For more information, see Defining priority hierarchy.

You must have the system administrator permission to create and manage priorities.

This topic contains the following information:

Video

The following video (6:47) provides information about configuring priorities and setting up priority hierarchy in Track-It!.&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;

https://youtu.be/5Xk4rc2H82g Open link

Out-of-the-box priorities

Track-It! provides some out-of-the-box priorities. Based on your requirement, you can modify the out-of-the-box priorities or create new priorities. The out-of-the-box priorities take the server time zone.
For example, the time zone of a priority for a server installed in Houston is the UTC time zone.

The following table provides information and suggested resolution times for each out-of-the-box priority:

Priority	Description	Resolution time
1 - Critical	Highest priority to organization	2 hours
2 - High	High priority to organization	4 hours
3 - Medium	Medium priority to organization	8 hours
4 - Low	Low priority to organization	5 days
5 - Very low	Lowest priority to organization	10 days

For example, a server that is down, has a high impact on the organization's work and needs immediate attention. A ticket raised for this issue can be assigned the priority 1 - Critical.

To create a priority

On the header bar, expand the hamburger menu and select Configuration.
Click Lookups > Priorities.
On the Priorities page, click New.
In the New Priority dialog box, in the Priority Name field, enter an appropriate priority name.
In the Description field, enter description about the new priority.
Click the Time Zone list.
In the Select Time Zone dialog box, select a time zone and click OK.
Click the Work Schedules list.
In the Select from Work Schedules dialog box, select a work schedule and click OK.
(Optional) Based on your requirement, select the Adjust due date based on the assigned technician's schedule check box.
(Optional) To prevent users from applying this priority to a record, select the Mark as Inactive check box.

To define the ticket defaults, in the Ticket Defaults section, enter the appropriate values in days:hh:mm:ss format for the following fields:

Field	Description
Expected Due Duration	The time by which the record with the selected priority must be resolved.
Expected Fix Duration	The time that the record with the selected priority requires to be fixed.
Expected Response Duration	The time by which a response to the record with the selected priority must be sent.

The due date of a ticket is calculated based on the client's time zone and the technician’s work schedule.
For example, if a technician’s work schedule is from 8 AM to 5 PM and a ticket with Priority 1 (resolution time: 2 hours) is submitted at 4 PM, the due date for the ticket is calculated as 9 AM on the next working day.

Best Practice

Although it is not mandatory, BMC recommends that you add values for the ticket default fields.

Click Save.

Defining Priority Hierarchy

When you create a category, a location, a department, or a requestor, you can assign a default priority to each of them. When you create a record, if you enter a value in the Category, Location, Department, and Requestor fields, the priority of a ticket is populated based on the precedence order defined in the priority hierarchy of the technician group. The higher-ranked items in the priority hierarchy take precedence over the lower-ranked items. A unique priority hierarchy can be configured differently for each group.

If a service level agreement (SLA) is attached to a record, the priority of the SLA takes precedence over the priority hierarchy. However, if no SLA is attached to a record, the priority is assigned based on the priority hierarchy.

Default priority hierarchy
Priority hierarchy example
To define a priority hierarchy for a group

Default priority hierarchy

By default, all groups are assigned the order of precedence in the priority hierarchy as shown in the following figure:

Based on the above order of precedence, if the values for the above fields have a priority, the ticket is assigned the priority based on the selected category. If the category does not have a default priority, the record is assigned the priority linked to the location and so on. By default, the same priority hierarchy is set for all technician groups. However, you can configure a custom priority hierarchy for each group.

Note

Priority hierarchy applies only to those ticket and assignment forms that are opened (for creating or editing) by a technician. It does not apply to records that are created or updated by business rules or templates.

Priority hierarchy example

A group has a priority hierarchy set in the following order of precedence and each of the fields have a linked priority:

Precedence in Priority hierarchy	Field	Default priority
1	Department	Medium
2	Location	Critical
3	Category	Low
4	Requestor	High

Based on the above priority hierarchy, the record that is created is assigned the priority Medium because the Department field has the highest precedence in the priority hierarchy.

To define a priority hierarchy for a group

On the header bar, expand the hamburger menu , and select Configuration.
Click SLAs and Business Rules.
From Service Level Agreements menu, select Priority Hierarchy.
On the Priority Hierarchy page, in the Group list, select a group.
In the Priority preference (top-down order) section, click a value and use the up and down arrows to define the order of precedence.
Click Save.

Editing or deleting a priority

Navigate to the Priorities page (hamburger menu > Configuration> Lookups> Priorities).

On the Priorities page, perform one of the following actions:

Goal	Steps
To edit the priority	Select the priority you want to modify and then click Edit. In the Priority: priorityName dialog box, edit the required fields. Click Save.
To delete the priority	Select the priority you want to delete and then click Delete. In the Delete Record dialog box, click Yes.