Ticket Types and Priorities

There are two important attributes of service desk tickets that are important to understand, Type and Priority.

• Type categorizes tickets in light of what is being requested.
• Priority indicates the scope and impact of the request.

Ticket Type

There are five types of tickets each with it's own characteristics.

Incident

Formally: an unplanned interruption or material reduction in the quality of a technology Service, or a confirmed Breach of Security. Issues with unknown causes or unpredictable paths to resolution are likely incidents. 

Priority/Severity - An incident is normally High or Urgent priority

Expectations for Incidents (SLAs)
Priority/Severity	Notification	Restoration Goal
Critical/Urgent	15 minutes	12 hours
High	30 minutes	2 Business Days
Medium/Normal	60 minutes	14 Business Days
Low	120 minutes	As scheduled

 

Problem

A problem ticket represents a known issue, that may or may not have been the cause for one or more incident tickets.  Problem tickets may not be visible to service desk end users depending on the issue.  Incidents are grouped under problems and open incidents are resolved along with the problem when the problem is resolved.  The resolution statement to the problem will propagate to all open incidents at the time of problem resolution. Incidents under a problem may be resolved by workarounds independent of the problem.

Priority/Severity - A problem is Normal, High or Urgent priority

Question

A ticket is a question if the request is for information about or assistance using an Oregon E-Government offering.  Also questions or requests for assistance that are outside the realm of our influence and assistance that get referred to agency/entity contacts are questions.

Priority/Severity - A Question is normally Low or Normal priority and will be reviewed within 24 hours of submission.

Task

A ticket may be set as a task if the request is for a piece of work to be completed either currently or at a later date that does not constitute a change to an existing or new service.  Tasks might be set as reminders for announcements or updates, setting a server job to run at a specific time or obtaining and delivering server logs to a partner.

Priority/Severity - A Task is normally Normal priority and will be reviewed within 24 hours of submission.

Change

Changes may be standard or non-standard.

Standard Change - things like password resets and additions of users to custom applications.  Also configuration changes that do not require custom development, website CSS changes that are documented and other minor changes where the process is known, documented and the outcome is predictable.

Non-standard Change - These are changes that require new or custom development and changes that add or remove features or functionality in custom applications or websites.  Non-standard changes may require review, estimation, planning, scheduling, compensation or contractual modifications and are usually not quick turnarounds.  Larger and more involved non-standard changes may leave the ticketing queue and take on a project or formal change request life of their own.

Priority/Severity - Changes may be Low, Normal, High or Urgent priority.  Hi and urgent priority changes are in response to high and urgent priority incidents.  Normal standard and non-standard changes will be reviewed within 24 hours of submission.

Ticket Priorities

The priority of a ticket is set by service desk staff in response to the impact, scope and severity of the request or issue presented. The priority of a ticket can change over the life of the ticket as is appropriate to the immediate impact of the issue. Requests may arise that do not qualify as a high priority, but need to be dealt with in an inordinately timely matter or in a rush.  Wherever possible, these will be recognized by the context of the request and every effort will be made to fulfill the need presented.  The ticket field for priority will be set according to the definitions here even though the request may be expedited for agency or entity business needs.  

The following definitions are used to determine the priority of a ticket.

Low

Service desk staff rarely sets a ticket as a low priority unless the requester specifically identifies the request as such.  Low priority tickets might be requests for information, user profile or access changes or things of  nature that are not mission critical to the business needs of the requester at the time.

Low priority submissions will be reviewed within 24 hours of receipt.

Normal

Most tickets fall into the normal category.  All requests that do not represent a serious degradation of services or financial impact hold a normal priority.

Normal priority submissions will be reviewed within 24 hours of receipt.

High

Tickets that qualify for a high priority are those dealing with service degradation that stops a body of work  within an application or service.  The whole application does not need to be affected for a ticket to qualify for high priority.  High priority issues are also those that indicate loss of revenue due to multiple transaction failures that do not stem from card holder errors or card account problems.

High priority incidents will be addressed according to the Expectations/SLA's described above.

Urgent

Urgent matters are those where an entire service, application or website is unavailable to it's intended audience.  In plain terms, an outage is an urgent matter.  Urgent tickets may or may not indicate financial loss to an Oregon agency or entity.

Urgent priority incidents will be addressed according to the Expectations/SLA's described above.