Priority Matrix
You can set the Priorities to be applied to calls based on Urgency and Impact levels.
According to ITIL, the priority of a call should be derived from its urgency (how quickly the disruption in service is going to affect people) and its impact (how many people the disruption is affecting).
Many organizations will raise the priority in order to get a ticket handled faster. For example, VIP's, aging tickets, or very unhappy customers might be made a P-1 in order to satisfy the client. But while this may achieve the desired result in the short term, it will have deleterious effects in the long-term. A better way to handle these scenarios is with special Service Level Agreements and special Escalation Paths. Use the Global Search to find out more:
IPK Workflow Rules
SLM
Service Level Agreements
VIP
Escalations
Artificially inflating the priority of an incident to get it seen sooner undermines the reliability of the ITIL prioritization framework, which aims to ensure that resources are allocated based on the actual urgency and impact of incidents. This behavior could lead to:
Resource Misallocation: Critical resources may be diverted to less critical issues, potentially delaying the resolution of more severe incidents that genuinely affect more users or critical business processes.
Workflow Disruption: It disrupts the flow of incident management, creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies in dealing with incidents in a systematic manner.
Priority Dilution: Over time, the practice of inflating priorities can dilute the meaning of priority levels, making it difficult to distinguish between truly high-priority incidents and those marked as such for faster attention.
Future Planning Impediments: It impedes accurate reporting and analysis of incident data, which is crucial for identifying trends, planning future improvements, and making informed decisions about IT infrastructure investments.
Therefore, adhering to established priority matrices and definitions is crucial for the effective management of incidents, ensuring that IT support efforts are focused where they are most needed and can have the most significant impact.
If your system is partitioned, you should create and define Call Impact, Call Urgency, Call Priority levels, and a Priority Matrix in each partition to ensure that calls logged via an incoming email account are allocated the correct Call Priority.
Selecting a Priority
Before you start
As some parameters are read from the database at application start-up, we recommend that there are no Analysts logged on when you make changes to system settings.
You must have IPK Setup enabled within the Admin tab of your General Access Security Role.
In order for the Priority value to be automatically applied when creating a call, Impact-Urgency Priority Derivation must be selected on the IPK Settings window. Once this setting is enabled, when you create a call, the Priority field will automatically complete based on the Impact and Urgency criteria that you select. The Priority field cannot be edited from within the Incident window.
Select ≡ > Admin > System Administration. The System Administration window appears.
In the Explorer pane, expand IPK Management.
Select Priority Matrix to open the window. The Impact column shows the impact types that have been defined in Call Impact. The other columns each correspond to the values defined in the Call Urgency window. You can adjust the column widths if required.
For each impact and urgency combination, click in the table cell to select the priority to be used for that combination of urgency and impact.
These priorities appear as a drop down box and correspond to the values defined in the Call Priority window.
If a priority has been deleted through the Call Priorities window, it will still appear in the priority matrix but the title will be appended with an asterisk (*) alerting you that you should select an active priority for the impact and urgency.
Save the changes.
Provide the Change Reasons if prompted to do so.
If you wish to change the priority that you have defined for an urgency/impact intersection, simply select the value you wish to change and choose a new value from the drop down list.
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