Assigning Priorities to Problem Tickets

[sigquit]

What's your approach to assigning priorities to problem tickets? I'm thinking that definitely the service desk should be responsible for it (and not the customer) and they should react according to some per-service guides, in which is specified what could go wrong and what priority to assign to it. Any comments to this or other ideas?
Thanks!

[Ziad]

From your post, I can read that you are assuming that the Service Desk function is governed by the Problem Management Process.

That would be possible in a way, but the Service Desk agents will be VERY skilled and will sure be overwhelmed. I do not have any idea how you'll be able to convince skilled personnel to do the agents tasks, I'll leave that to you. Personally, I won't even try.

The way I see it, Incident Management should govern the Service Desk function. I wouldn't advise having both Problem and Incident Management processes governing the Service Desk because of their conflicting objectives (incident management is after restoring normal service asap - that is as defined in the SLA - while problem management is not time bound).
I think that Problem Management should assign problems priorities (that's part of problem management activities anyway).

Regards,
Z

[sigquit]

The service desk shouldn't be that skilled - they should just follow some procedures written by system/network engineers. for example, they could have something like - if server X is down then create severity 1, if link between location A and location B is down, create severity 2. And so on. They should be able just to follow the guidelines, not write or interpret them.

[Azard]

Hi, from you post, you seem to have confused Incident Management with Problem Management. The Service desk handles restoration of service (Incident Management), not root cause analysis (Problem Management). The priority of a problem ticket should be determine by a set of criterias, defined with consultation by the business, if applicable. You are not going to talk to the business of the importance of having email go down for the entire organization, but you would about a particular application or system and its importance.

On another note, I disagree with the fact that the service desk shouldn't be skilled. The service desk is one of the most underrated groups in an organization. They require a great deal of skill. Not only very general knowledge on a lot of topics, but also have the ability to be personable all the time. You want to restore service as quickly as possible with the minimum number of people involved. If you have a strong service desk, you first call resolution should be very high.

Now if you meant having the service desk determine the priority of an Incident ticket, I would have you build an impact and urgency matrix and have it populate the priority. The matrix will be dependent on your business needs and the criterias you deem important. You will still want to allow for the flexibility of having the agent change the priority in certain instances, but for the most part, the auto-generated priority should be used.

Does this help?

Cheers,
_________________
Azard Omardeen
ITSM Service Manager Certified
Consultant and Trainer

[sigquit]

[Azard]

Hi, you need to make the matrix fit your own environment.

You could set up something like this:

1) Define Impact criterias such as High, Medium, Low,
- each of these would have to be based on a business impact, such as a department vs one user.

2) Define Urgency of High, Medium and Low.
- again decide if this is business critical or can it wait till the morning, etc.

3) Create a matrix based on these two. e.g. a Low / Low would give a Priority of 4, while a High / High would yield a Priority of 1.

You need to decide what works and then set the matrix accordingly. Make sure you are involving the business in this so everyone has the right level of expectation.


cheers
_________________
Azard Omardeen
ITSM Service Manager Certified
Consultant and Trainer