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 theApplication Propertiespage.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 theImpact/Urgency Matrixto match those on theApplication Propertiespage.You can use the mappings in theImpact/Urgency Matrixto create routing rules to set the priority of your incidents. To use these mappings, select theSet Priorityaction and then in the next drop-down list select theUsing Impact/Urgency Matrixoption.You can edit this matrix from theData Mappingpage. ClickAdmin > Process Automation. ExpandIncident Managementand clickService Dashboard. UnderActions: INCIDENT-MGMT, clickManage Data Mappings.
- In Workflow Designer, you can edit the advanced feeder form to reconfigure theAuto-calculate Prioritylink 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 theWorkflow Solutionsection.