URGENCY is the “damage” dimension: What is the impact on mission achievement? Is a core business service which directly supports the business mission down? Is it stopping people from working? Has the supply chain stopped? Are shipping targets being missed? Or is it a supporting service that has no direct impact on revenue generation? Going back to our customer service team example, if customer agents are completely unable to help customers with their requests, the damage to the company’s brand could be extensive.It makes perfect sense that if a whole customer service team’s CRM system is down, that should be treated as a higher priority than one agent going offline. IMPACT is the “scale” dimension: How widespread is the issue having an effect? Is it one individual, a team, a department, a campus, or everyone in a global organisation? Some organizations call this “Severity”, but the official ITIL 4 term is “Impact” (probably because it conjures up an image of a blast radius).ITIL 4 guidelines (based on established best practice in large and small organizations across the globe) recommend a two-dimensional matrix to model priorities: That makes 3 of the 7 guiding principles that apply to this one situation. Remember, Keep it simple and practical is another one of the 7 Guiding Principles of ITIL 4. Can be encoded into an ITSM tool to automatically identify priority levels.Can be used by IT people to quickly identify the business priority of an issue.Makes business sense so that business people can understand the model and recognise the individual levels.What is needed is a simple prioritisation model that: It is a manifestation of the Focus on Value principle of ITIL 4 as well as well as the collaborate and promote visibility principle. A mission-based priority model is a mechanism for business-IT-alignment. That means IT people and business stakeholders need to work together to create a mutual understanding of priority levels and how the work that IT does maps to these levels of business priority. The work that IT is doing (whether it’s planned or unplanned work) should always be prioritised according to the needs of the business mission. The clue is in the title: mission-based prioritisation.
Hint: Connect it to your business mission. So how do we define proper prioritisation? And who should decide what gets prioritised? The default values are shown in the table below.Every IT team in the world has too much work to do-so the ability to prioritise properly is critical. The Priority Values table holds records for all the possible priority values used in the priority matrix, making it faster to set up new priority matrices. Urgencies only appear in requests if the value in the request's Service Priority Group field overlaps with the Available for Priority Group field in the Urgency record. The Urgencies table contains a record for each possible urgency value that can be selected within a request record. The Order field defines the order in which the impact is listed in the drop-down list.
Within a request, the available impacts are filtered based on the priority group of the Service for the request being contained in the Impact record's Available for Priority Groups field. Each impact can be made available for one or more priority groups. The Impacts table contains all possible Impact values that can be selected in the request tables. That will make those values available to create the priority matrix. Then, either the existing impact and urgency records can be updated to add that priority group to the available groups, or new impact and urgency records can be created and linked to the new group. In order to set up a new priority group, the priority group must first just be created, named, and saved. For example, the priority matrix for standard service requests has six levels of priority.Īll of the wording in the priority matrix fields is defined for the specific priority group, so it is possible to have completely different priority lists for different services, as needed. They are applied based on the request type and each priority group can have its own set of urgencies, impacts, and priority matrix of values that result from all combinations of urgency and impact within a record. Priority Groups TableĮach service in the Service Portfolio table is linked to a Priority Group.īy default there are six priority groups, but you can create additional ones as needed. This section describes how these tables work. There are five tables that manage the urgency, impact and priority values that are shown within a Service Request, Incident, Change Request, Problem or Release record.