About the Incident Priority

Every incident that is submitted to the ServiceDesk is assigned a priority. This priority lets you determine how the incident is routed and when it is escalated. The prioritization of incidents helps you manage Service Level Agreements (SLA) and comply with the concepts of ITIL service management.
A user who submits an incident can specify the urgency and the impact. You can use these values to calculate the incident’s priority and to create routing rules for its initial routing. This automatic calculation eliminates guesswork and prevents the user from assigning a high priority to every incident. The support technician who works the incident can change the urgency values and impact values as well as the calculated priority.
A support technician who uses the advanced incident form can specify the urgency, impact, and priority. The priority is not calculated automatically because the support workers can assess an incident’s priority better than the users can.
ServiceDesk contains default values for the urgency, impact, and priority settings. The values that are available differ between the standard incident form and the advanced incident form. For the user’s benefit, the values that appear on the standard incident form are more descriptive.
Most ServiceDesk implementations either use the default priority, impact, and urgency values or make only minor changes.
To change these values and make them available in your Incident Management process, you need to modify different areas of the process as follows:
  • In the Process Manager portal, you can edit these values on the
    Application Properties
    page.
    These are the values that you can choose from on the advanced incident form and on the "simple" incident form.
  • In the Process Manager portal, you can change the impact, urgency, and priority values in the
    Impact/Urgency Matrix
    to match those on the
    Application Properties
    page.
    You can use the mappings in the
    Impact/Urgency Matrix
    to create routing rules to set the priority of your incidents. To use these mappings, select the
    Set Priority
    action and then in the next drop-down list select the
    Using Impact/Urgency Matrix
    option.
    You can edit this matrix from the
    Data Mapping
    page. Click
    Admin > Process Automation
    . Expand
    Incident Management
    and click
    Service Dashboard
    . Under
    Actions: INCIDENT-MGMT
    , click
    Manage Data Mappings
    .
  • In Workflow Designer, you can edit the advanced feeder form to reconfigure the
    Auto-calculate Priority
    link on the advance incident form.
    Changing the values requires caution and a good understanding of the Symantec Workflow software. You can change the available impact and urgency values and the priority that is assigned to the combination of the two values. You make these changes by editing the advanced feeder form in Workflow Designer.
    For more information about forms customization and project modifications, see the
    Workflow Solution
    section.