Enterprise-wide, extensive/widespread, moderate/multi-user, individual/single user.

Number of IT systems/services/elements involvedĪ variety of terms can help identify the impact, or effect, of an incident:.

Amount of lost revenue or incurred costs.

Usually, impact would not be expressed in absolute terms, but rather a range or degree that is subject to the interpretation of your company’s context. Loss of revenue, manhours, or customers following IT service downtime or poor performance are all negative effects.

Conversely, it could be very negative based on the degree of damage or cost that results. This effect could be positive: a return on investment or customer satisfaction such as a new feature or improvement to a product. ITILv3 defines impact as a measure of the effect of an incident, problem, or change on business processes. Let’s take a look at each of these factors and how context and relativity support them. These are items only you and your company can define, not an equation. Instead, looking at impact, urgency, and priority is more about making decisions about relative importance and context. Though you can boil these components down to a simple mathematical equation, I caution you against this. How IT responds, handles, and resolves any request or issue to the business and/or customers depends upon what both parties think about impact and urgency. In ITSM, the most common prioritization model involves understanding impact and urgency.

Prioritization is vital for IT and business needs: it tells us the relative importance of an incident, so you’ll know how quickly to respond to address it, and how long that effort might take. To determine whether something is a value-add, you must define, prioritize, and measure the activities that do and don’t support such efforts. But if you take a different view-a view of how your handle incidents, changes, and requests-you’ll get a clearer picture on priorities from both sides. Of course, struggles to align IT with business needs are well documented. When it comes to business priorities, nothing speaks louder than having available and reliable IT services that support business outcomes. These things include the time and effort spent on reducing business friction. Myles Suer, writing for CIO magazine, states that IT leaders “need to focus upon things which provide value to customers”.

4 box priority matrix