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White Paper
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Nicholas Glaser
26 March 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Welcome to the “Getting Started with BMC Remedyforce”
Series
Today’s IT departments must drive business growth and innovation, while coping with less resources and increasing complexity. To
do this, they require an IT Service Management solution that provides best practices while minimizing costs. BMC Remedyforce is
built on Salesforce—the world's most widely used cloud platform—to deliver complete IT service management functionality with the
secure social, mobile, and collaborative capabilities users expect.
With the “Getting Started with Remedyforce” white paper series, our aim is to help you leverage BMC Remedyforce to improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of your ITSM operations. Each paper addresses a specific area of interest and provides you with
conceptual, functional and technical best practices to make configuration decisions and take action to gain value from your BMC
Remedyforce investment.
Impact, Urgency and Priority
One of the most basic challenges every service delivery organization faces comes from prioritizing the records submitted by their
customers. Just the assessing the importance of one record over another in an elemental way can be difficult, but when you add in
other factors such as the status of the customer, timing in the fiscal year, safety, compliance or effect on related services, the
subject can become even more clouded. One way to alleviate this pressure is to leverage an empirical methodology that limits
agent bias and allows the business to establish the hierarchy of work. In Remedyforce, this methodology consists of two measures,
impact (an evaluation of scope) and urgency (an evaluation of effect) and uses a consistent formula to produce an actionable
priority. The purpose of this white paper is to provide best practices guidance for the configuration of impact, urgency and priority
values in your Remedyforce environment.
Priority: A category for the relative importance of a record based on impact and urgency. (Source: ITIL, v3)
Prioritization enables the business to organize, assign and prioritize work in an objective way, by establishing a method by which an
individual agent can evaluate records raised by customers. Prioritization is often determined by two separate factors known as
impact and urgency. These two quantifiable elements take work prioritization from a subjective assessment to a more objective
measurement of the impact of a request, outage or change to a service delivery environment.
Priority is a dynamic attribute that may change over the lifecycle of a record and, consequently, may need to be altered to reflect
these changes as more information is gathered about the work to be completed. While initial prioritization of a record is important, it
is also important that the final state of the record’s priority reflect the true values for impact and urgency for accurate reporting
against Service Level Agreements.
Impact: A measure of the effect of an Incident, Problem or Change on Business Processes. Impact is often
based on how Service Levels will be affected. (Source: ITIL, v3)
Impact is the scope of the effect of a customer request, incident, problem or change on the environment. Often, impact statements
can be quantified as a number (1-5, 6-10, etc.) of users being affected by an incident in the service delivery environment. However,
sometimes unique organizational or institutional requirements by a customer may require impact statements to be organized by
organizational unit (single end-user, single work group, multiple work groups, enterprise), health or safety concerns, financial loss or
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
legislative breach. Often, impact statements can be quantified as the level of service degradation caused by an incident or problem
(low, medium, high).
Urgency: A measure of how long it will be until an Incident, Problem or Change has a significant impact on the
Business. (Source: ITIL, v3)
Urgency is the measure of the rapidity with which the work needs to be addressed. The most common way people express
urgency is in a time figure (when is the fix or service needed?) or a simple High/Medium/Low or numerical value. However,
sometimes unique organizational or institutional requirements by a customer may require impact statements to be organized by the
degree to which services are compromised by an incident (low, medium, high) or time available before business impact.
Impact, Urgency and Priority – Best Practices
When first establishing impact and urgency statements, a service delivery provider should seek the acceptance of the defined
impact and urgency values and approval of the Priority Matrix by the customer (the party paying for the service). Once the
customer accepts these settings, priority serves as one of the most significant driving forces of the Service Management process
by allowing the service delivery provider to align its activities with those of the business.
Additionally, this alignment also means that when users inquire as to the process utilized to determine the priority of their request,
the service provider can demonstrate an established methodology and the support of the service customer’s approval of that
method. This reduces the frequency of conflict between service provider and consumer with regards to prioritization and timeliness
of work.
Best Practices – Impact
An impact record creates the values that are used to specify the impact that an incident, task, broadcast, change request, problem,
or release has on an account.
The following are the default impact values:
•
HIGH
•
MEDIUM
•
LOW
You can create more impact records as part of the configuration tasks to set up BMC Remedyforce for use in the organization.
Best Practices – Urgency
An urgency record identifies the speed to resolve an incident, task, broadcast, change request, or problem and determine how the
record escalates through the service desk.
The following are the default urgency values:
•
HIGH
•
MEDIUM
•
LOW
You can create more urgency records as part of the configuration tasks to set up BMC Remedyforce for use in the organization.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Best Practices – Priority
Priority records allow you to define how to process and escalate incidents, tasks, broadcasts, change requests, and problems.
When you assign an impact and urgency to an incident, task, broadcast, change request, problem, or release record, BMC
Remedyforce assigns the priority that corresponds to the unique combination of the impact and urgency values of the record. For
example, if you select HIGH as the Urgency ID and MEDIUM as the Impact ID of the record, BMC Remedyforce assigns 2 to the
Priority ID of the record.
When you assign an impact and urgency to an incident, task, broadcast, change request, or problem record, BMC Remedyforce
uses the values to calculate the priority based on this formula:
The Priority Matrix defines the out-of-the-box combinations of urgency and impact values and their corresponding priority values.
If you create or delete urgency or impact records, you must update the Priority Matrix so that the Priority ID and due date calculation
are updated appropriately.
NOTE: The due date of the incident, task, or problem is calculated using the duration defined in the priority
record.
Once Impact and Urgency statements have been developed they should be entered into a matrix to determine the total number of
priority values for the service delivery environment.
Figure 1 - Sample Priority Matrix
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
Impact, Urgency and Priority in BMC Remedyforce
Within the BMC Remedyforce application, priority has its own Custom Object in the database which is leveraged by multiple other
objects in the database (Incident, Problem, Change, Release and Task). Impact and urgency values are also therefore utilized by
multiple objects in Salesforce database.
This means that BMC Remedyforce can use priority to leverage workflows to alert an appropriate group within a service delivery
organization, escalate a ticket, and allow association with a particular Service Level Agreement, or many other functions. If a
particular category is associated with a business service or area deemed critical to the organization, the priority of the ticket can be
elevated by BMC Remedyforce through automation. This can be useful when receiving ticket information from an automated
source such as monitoring or asset management software.
Impact, Urgency and Priority – Configuration Steps
Creating Impacts
To create an impact attribute
1) Click the Remedyforce Administration tab.
Figure 1 - Impact Configuration
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2)
On the Home page, click the Configure Application tile, and from the menu select Impact.
3)
In the impact list view, click New.
Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
4)
In the Impact ID field, type a unique alphanumeric identifier that you want to assign to the current impact record.
5)
Click Save.
6)
(Optional) To designate the current record as inactive, select the Inactive check box.
NOTE: Records marked as inactive are not included in any search performed on the database.
Creating Urgencies
To create an urgency attribute
1) Click the Remedyforce Administration tab.
Figure 2 - Urgency Configuration
2)
On the Home Page, click the Configure Application tile, and from the menu select Urgency.
Creating priorities
To create a priority in BMC Remedyforce
1) Click the Remedyforce Administration tab.
2)
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On the Home page, click the Configure Application tile, and from the menu select “Priority”
Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
3)
Figure 4 – Priority Configuration
4)
To create a priority, in the priorities list view, click New.
5)
In the Priority ID field, type a name of the priority.
6)
In the Description field, type a description of the priority record.
7)
In the Duration field, type the amount of time that must be used to calculate the due date.
The value must be typed in this format: HH:MM. For example, 08:00 means that the incident that is assigned this priority
is expected to be resolved within 8 hours.
8)
From the Impacts list, select the applicable impact.
The selected impact must reflect the level of impact that is associated with all records that are assigned with the current
priority.
NOTE: The description of the selected impact is filled in the Impact Description field.
9)
From the Urgency list, select the required urgency.
The selected urgency must reflect the speed of response that is associated with all records that are assigned with the
current priority.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
Impact, Urgency and Priority
Getting Started with Remedyforce Series
NOTE: The description of the selected urgency is filled in the Urgency Description field.
10) Click Save.
11) (Optional) To designate the current record as inactive, select the Inactive check box.
NOTE: Records marked as inactive are not included in any search performed on the database.
In Summary
Impact, urgency and priority are important elements of your ITSM practice. BMC strongly encourages you to give these values and
their use in your organization the due time and consideration they deserve. There is excellent additional documentation to be found
on this topic on the Remedyforce support wiki pages:
•
•
•
•
Creating Impacts
Creating Urgencies
Creating Priorities
Configuring Urgency Assignment Order
Fortunately, the BMC Remedyforce Services team to assist you in focusing on developing a prioritization structure which will give
your organization a solid place to start, and allow you to custom fit the approach for your organization. You can learn more about
BMC Remedyforce Professional Services at bmc.com/it-services/remedyforce-services.html.
BMC Remedyforce has an extremely active user community where you can get answers to additional questions on this topic. We
encourage you to take a look at bmc.com/communities.
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Copyright BMC Software, Inc. 2015
BMC delivers software solutions that help IT transform digital enterprises for the ultimate competitive business advantage. We have
worked with thousands of leading companies to create and deliver powerful IT management services. From mainframe to cloud to
mobile, we pair high-speed digital innovation with robust IT industrialization—allowing our customers to provide amazing user
experiences with optimized IT performance, cost, compliance, and productivity. We believe that technology is the heart of every
business, and that IT drives business to the digital age.
BMC – Bring IT to Life.