Frequently Asked Question
When you log an Incident with IT Services, we will Triage it, which involves assigning it a priority which helps us to ensure we fix the most important issues first. Triage is French for "Sort" and is used primarily in healthcare, but is being used more and more in IT, in recent years.
With all issues we rely on accurate information from you to help us to make the right decisions. When logging an incident please give us as much information as you have about the people and work affected. If you think that we have made a mistake or have missed information, then please contact us to let us know.
Urgency and Impact
Impact is based on what work is being affected, and how many people are having the same issue. If an issue is preventing you from carrying out your professional duties then please let the IT Service Desk team know when you are logging your ticket.
We use a Matrix, to determine Priority, by looking at the urgency and Impact. The below graphic, will help you understand how this matrix works and how we use it to make decisions on how we prioritise your incident.
We use the following Impact scores:
HIGH – When major services are unavailable or severely degraded for multiple people, or when legal, reputational or safety risks exist.
MEDIUM – When only minor services are partly or fully unavailable, or an issue which is preventing a small number of people from carrying out part of their work.
LOW – An issue which is not preventing you carrying out you work, or where you have a reasonable workaround or alternative.
Urgency is based on how quickly IT Services ideally need to respond to stop the issue from getting any worse:
HIGH – We should respond immediately, the issue might get worse quickly, or it is preventing people from carrying out time-sensitive work.
MEDIUM – We should respond as soon as an IT team member becomes available. We believe that that the issue needs to be addressed quickly, but don't expect it to get worse.
LOW – We should plan our response in advance – we believe that the issue is unlikely to get worse and no time-sensitive work is at risk.
SCHEDULED – The response date and time has already been agreed between you and IT Services.
Priority
Our system combines these two scores to automatically set a Priority on the Incident. This is then used by our IT teams to decide in what order they need to fix issues, so that we fix the most important issues first. The priorities are:
1 - Priority One - Critical
We aim to fix the issue without any delay
2 - Priority Two - Urgent
We aim to fix the issue within 4 hours
3 - Priority Three - Medium
We aim to fix the issue within 6 hours
4 - Priority Four - Medium
We aim to fix the issue within 24 hours
5 - Priority Five - Standard
We aim to fix the issue within 3 working days
6 - Priority Six - Standard
We aim to fix the issue within 5 working days
In the majority of cases we fix issues well before the target set.
In relation top problem tickets: Please see this document for resolution times.