Our need for prioritization can be summarized with four truths: The four truths of organizational supply and demand Although improved efficiency is sometimes a secondary benefit of prioritization, it is not the main goal. In other words, they believe that good prioritization is about getting more done in a shorter amount of time using the least resources. Many managers assume that prioritization is an efficiency issue. It may seem like a naïve question, but it is one worth asking. Just remember that no policy fully covers every situation and rigid policies can often lead to indecision and delay, which are enemies of prioritization. To be sure, policy has its place, and we have often helped organizations write incident management procedures and other policies. They see this as an invitation to do whatever one wants to do. Some IT professionals bristle at the promotion of guidelines over policies. As a more general guideline, it sets forth high-level organizational priorities, but leaves final discretion to the employee closest to the task. There are always going to be exceptions, and people should use their best judgement. Note that this approach does not need to be a hard and fast rule, standard, best practice, or even a policy. For example, an organization might recommend that when in doubt, staff should focus on critical (for example, P1 and P2), customer-facing incidents first over project and maintenance-related tasks and service requests.
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Despite the reasonable logic, he was fired because the organization did not communicate any guidelines, preferences, or policies in prioritizing work (in fact, this specific issue represents more of a failure of leadership than an error in judgement on the part of the technician).Įffective organizations establish and communicate high-level guidelines to help employees make judgement calls when prioritization is in question. The technician was aware of the priority 2 incident, but he reasoned that, despite the VIP status of the incident reporter, implementing the request for change properly had a higher impact on the overall organization. At the same time the incident was escalated to tier 2, the assigned technician was busy working on implementing a planned infrastructure change which would have caused disruption to an entire department if it failed. As it turns out, the priority 2 incident was reported by a VIP. He relayed to me that one of his best employees was just fired by the IT Director for failing to address a priority 2 incident in a timely fashion. During a break I asked him if everything was alright. I could see through our glass training room wall that his gestures became very animated, and his face started to turn an unhealthy shade of red. Once in the middle of a class, one of my students, an IT manager, walked out of the room to take a call. We will also answer the question, “What are the pros and cons of each prioritization type and when should we use them?” as well as “What does the ITIL framework or ‘body of knowledge’ recommend and how has ITIL advice on prioritization evolved over time?” The Role of Organizational Guidelines and Policies Our focus is on prioritization across work streams when our team has different types of work in the queue (e.g., responding to incidents, performing maintenance, fulfilling service requests, completing tasks on projects, etc.) and we will learn about the various prioritization techniques and tools that support them, including Priority Matrices, Swarming, Kanban, and more. In this article, we discuss ways to prioritize operational and project tasks – essentially any unit of work that can be “ticketized” or decomposed into a discrete unit of work (sure, it is possible to prioritize product and service portfolios, financial investments, and the like but we cover those subjects in other articles – like this one on the Quick ROI/PACE prioritization technique that can help leaders better prioritize strategic project and program ideas).
#ITIL PRIORITY MATRIX FULL#
But how do we know we are working on the most impactful tasks, and is that really the full story? Fundamentally, the issue comes down to prioritization. Prudence suggests working on the most important items first.
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only to reappear twice as bad – due to neglect – at the most inconvenient time.
![itil priority matrix itil priority matrix](http://depressedpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ImpactUrgencyPriority.png)
Some work items fall into the “when I get to it” category while others simply fall off our radar. And there aren’t enough resources to work on it. There is more work to do than time to do it in. In fact, there is a good chance that our teams are experiencing this pain right now. Priorities: There will always be more work than time to do it.