Difference between Impact, Urgency and Priority

ITIL has attempted to clarify the incident severity identification in order for organizations to properly resolve important issues quickly. Let’s look at the definitions

Impact defines the enormity of the situation and mostly deals with “How Many” question. It can be in terms of people, finances, systems, etc. Following examples will provide a little more clarity.

• ·         Number of people affected
• ·         Potential financial losses
• ·         Severity of legal liabilities
• ·         Number of systems affected

Urgency is associated with time. The time it takes to have the perceived Impact. You may think of Urgency as the amount of fuel in an airborne plane. The fuel will run out after a certain time and that duration will define your urgency. If the fuel is expected to run out before the first landing attempt then urgency would be higher as compare to running out before the second or third landing attempts.  

Priority is defined as a function of urgency, some organizations use Priority = Impact + Urgency and others use Priority = Impact * Urgency. Regardless, the end result is a priority for a particular scenario. 

You may use the following chart as a starting point and modify the priority definition based on your organizational needs. Similar to PMP, ITIL is not obsessed with a particular definition of priority, but enforces the idea of having a clear definition. How do you get to that definition is based on your own needs.

	Impact
Urgency		High	Medium	Low
	Critical	P1	P2	P2
	Urgent	P1	P2	P3
	Normal	P2	P2	P3

Before you attempt to draw the above chart for your organization, you need to make sure that definitions for Urgency and Impact are clearly defined. Those definitions will help you determine the Priorities.

Next step after completing this chart will be to implement SLAs (Service Level Agreements) based on the Priority definitions. I.e. P1 could ask for a 24hrs resolution time or P2 could ask for a 3 day resolution time. In addition to the resolution time, you could also associate milestone reporting or timely reporting against with SLAs.

At this point a good question to ask would be “Why am I doing this instead of focusing on my business?”

The main purpose for this exercise is for you to be able to tackle higher priority issues quickly in order to avoid or reduce the impact. This will also allow you to measure the performance of your team against the SLAs and it is this measurement that will give you the ability to drive and monitor improvements in the organization.