Priority matrix in an organisation3/16/2023 ![]() ![]() If you're service desk team are doing this, talk to us about how we can automate both for you in just a few days. Manual prioritisation and routing of issues are two things that IT people shouldn't be spending time on. Once automated, you remove the scope for human error and you can be confident that work is being prioritised correctly, every time. ![]() That’s why it’s important to define a clear model and then automate prioritisation based on the information logged in your ITSM tool. What you really don’t want is people/ITSM tools tagging issues with the wrong priority levels-because your people will be working on the wrong things. If an ITSM tool cannot easily look at impact/urgency indicators and automatically set the priority level, your model is probably too complicated. If a service desk agent is looking at an issue and can’t easily decide which box it fits into, your model is probably too complicated. This is commonly paraphrased as: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” It’s up to you, but you should have a strong reason as to why you are deviating from the most simple form of the model.Īlbert Einstein once said, “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” ![]() Or you could apply a 3x5 model, with impact represented as individual/team/department/campus/global. Like the diagram above, you could choose a simple 3x3 model, with the impact levels being represented by individual/group/all. It’s really important that there are clear lines between the levels in the matrix-otherwise people (or ITSM system rules for automated prioritisation) won’t know how to map issues/requests to priority levels accurately and consistently. People abandon models they find confusing. The economic damage of an annoying printer fault will be near-zero.Ī priority matrix shouldn’t be overly complicated, or it won’t work. 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? Every IT team in the world has too much work to do-so the ability to prioritise properly is critical. ![]()
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