Establishing Support Structure › Priority Calculation

Priority Calculation

Priority calculation is a predefined set of values that automatically set Priority, Urgency, and Impact fields on problems and incidents. Priority calculation helps you manage incidents and problems for your business needs and IT capabilities. ITIL recommends that you prioritize tickets by using a data calculation that is based on Urgency and Impact values. Support organizations define this calculation based on their unique processes, how this calculation determines Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and other key events in the system. This calculation can also include the criticality of the CI that is linked to the incident and problem. Prioritizing tickets effectively helps you accomplish the following:

• Allocate IT resources for tickets
• Better serve customers
• Reduce costs

The CA SDM solution for Priority Calculation includes the following components:

• A Priority Calculation Matrix based on the Urgency and Impact values
• Default values for Urgency and Impact
• Urgency and Impact adjustment options based on Affected Service, Open Date, Affected End User, and Incident or Problem Area
• A Capture Reason option for manually modifying Urgency or Impact
• An Enable for Templates option for creating a ticket from a Template

When you install CA SDM, a Default priority calculation automatically manages ticket values. You can modify the Default priority calculation settings, or create additional priority calculations to manage incidents or problems. In the priority calculation, you define the outcome based on business scenarios to make the level of importance and ticket handling more consistent. Users can override some settings, but they cannot set the Priority on the ticket because this value is data-driven. For multi-tenancy, you or the tenants can create additional priority calculations with specific settings for each tenant.

When an analyst opens an incident or problem, the system automatically uses an active priority calculation and ticket values to generate Priority, Urgency, and Impact settings. The settings are based on one or more of the following fields:

• Urgency
• Impact
• Affected End User
• Incident or problem Area
• Open Date
• Affected Service

Analysts can override Urgency and Impact values as necessary. Depending on how you configure Options Manager, employees can only override incident Urgency values when the urgency_on_employee option is installed. When the Capture Reason flag is enabled and users override Urgency or Impact values and click Save, the Escalate Detail page appears to let users describe a reason for the change.

All ticket priority calculations, manual overrides, and reason information appear in the New Activity Log. If no priority calculation adjustments occur, the system does not create an activity log entry.

Note: If you migrated from a previous version, priority calculation is disabled by default. For information about how to enable priority calculation or retain your customizations, see the Implementation Guide.