Set ticket priorities everyone understands

Why priorities get ignored

If employees choose the priority themselves, soon everything is urgent. If IT sets it without a rule, it is a whim. Both lead to priorities being ignored. A good priority is easy to trace: anyone who knows the rule would arrive at the same level.

The impact and urgency matrix

Impact is how many people are affected: one person, a department or everyone. Urgency is how much it stops them working: not at all, partly or completely.

Everyday examples

Low

“A second monitor, please.” “A new keyboard, the old one sticks.”

Normal

“Outlook keeps asking for the password.” “The printer on the second floor prints only blank pages”, when another printer is nearby.

High

“The ERP system will not start for anyone.” “No internet in the whole building.” “Backup NAS-02 failed” for the third night running.

The same problem can have two priorities. “VPN keeps dropping” is normal for one person working from home and high for all field staff on Monday morning.

HIGH
Many people or a core system affected; work has stopped.
Example targets: response within 1 business hour,
resolution within 4 business hours.
Examples: ERP system, internet, mail server, tills

NORMAL
One person cannot work or can only work in part,
or a department is partly blocked.
Example targets: response within 4 business hours,
resolution within 1 business day.

LOW
A wish or improvement; work can continue.
Example targets: response within 1 business day,
resolution within 5 business days.

Employees say how much the problem stops them working.
IT sets the priority and records exceptions.

Adapt these targets to your staffing and business needs. They are examples, not promises that every team can keep.

What employees should tell you

Do not ask for the priority on the report form. Ask for the urgency, in their words: “Normal”, “Urgent”, “Everything has stopped”. IT knows the impact better, because it can see whether others are reporting the same thing. The priority results from both.

Handle special cases honestly

• Time-sensitive roles. Payroll on the 25th, dispatch before 2 pm. Write them down instead of keeping them in your head.
• Management. If their tickets are always high priority, say so openly. Unspoken rules are worse than spoken ones.
• Security issues. Suspected phishing or an infected computer is always high priority, even if only one person is affected.

When a priority changes

A priority is not a verdict for eternity. If it turns out that a whole department is affected rather than one person, it goes up. If someone finds a workaround that lets everyone carry on, it may come down. What matters is that the change is recorded in the ticket, with one sentence on why. Otherwise the reports look as if a deadline had been fudged.

“ERP” is a category, not a priority. A ticket in that category can be low priority if someone wants a report sorted differently, and high priority if nobody can book orders any more. If you tie categories to priorities automatically, you get a lot of false high-priority tickets. It is better to use rules that watch for words like “will not start” or “for everyone”, and to have one person take a quick look at new tickets.

Make the rules consistent

Write the table down and keep it where everyone in IT can find it. In the first four weeks, spend ten minutes once a week going through the high-priority tickets: was that really high? Would you have rated it differently? After a month, the differences between people have mostly disappeared.

At the end of the month, look at four things:

• How many tickets were high priority? If it is more than one in ten, the threshold is too low.
• How many high-priority tickets met their deadline?
• How many priorities were changed afterwards, and in which direction?
• Were there low-priority tickets that sat for weeks? Then you need a rule for tidying up.

Explain the queue to employees

In two sentences, in the portal or in the announcement, explain how IT prioritises: whatever affects many people or stops work comes first, and everything else follows in order. That takes away the pressure to mark every request as urgent, and makes it easier when a ticket sits for a day. Most people accept a wait if they know why and the estimate is honest.

If one person does all the IT, priorities can seem like overkill. They help precisely then, because they take away a decision that would otherwise come up twenty times a day. With three clear levels you know in the morning what comes first and can explain it when asked. And on holiday, whoever covers for you knows what they can leave.

If you have an emergency level, tie it to a different route, usually the phone. Whoever calls has to explain why it cannot wait until the next hour. That keeps the level rare and taken seriously.

Connect priority to service targets

A priority without a deadline is just an opinion. Only when each level has a response target and a resolution target, measured in business hours, does it become binding. 404desk comes with four levels, which appear in the German interface as “Niedrig” (low), “Mittel” (medium), “Hoch” (high) and “Kritisch” (critical). Each has its own targets, and automations can set the priority, for example “If the subject contains ERP, set the priority to high”. See SLAs and business hours.