Incident Priorities
Incidents can be raised with following Initial Priorities -
P1 - The most critical of possible disruptions needing mitigation as soon as possible.
The business is at a standstill causing financial loss and reputational damage. i.e. entire department(s) are unable to work and there is no workaround.
So even if Business is not standstill but there is a large financial exposure we treat it as P1
P2 - A disruption which renders an important part/function of an application diminished resulting in a business impact to the user. User can wait a day for a resolution.
P3 - An error for which a work-around exists resulting in a minor business impact to the user. User can wait a few days for a resolution.
P4 - An error where a work-around exists resulting in minimal business impact to the user. i.e. Training or guidance needed, general questions, or documentation requests.
Please note for the sake of simplicity we don't maintain severities at initial stage when incident tickets are raised.
Incidents can be Resolved with following Resolution Priorities -
P1/S1 - This is top most Priority and Severity. Its for Business Standstill situations.
P1/S2 - This is second top most Priority and Severity. Its for partial Business standstill situations.
P1/S3 - This is used for top priority incidents but for situarions such as large financial exposure / losses to the business, reputational damage, financial exposure for third party, clients.
P2 - Medium priority issues with financial exposure below $50,000/-
P3 - Config, process issues or bug reports which are not very critical.
P4 - User education, general questions which can wait for a week at least.
Incident initial priority can be different that Resolution priority and severity. The reason is obvious that we know business impacts better when incidnts are resolved as opposed to what we think it might be initially at the time of reporting an incident.
(Please note this is not a line on a stone. So we can update and tweak it further with more clear criteria for each priority and severity. Further we can develop a matrix of Incident priorities and severities per application giving application specific scenarios for each priority / severity)