This post is part of the Process Optimization Use Case Series where we’ll focus on different techniques to identify process inefficiencies, non-conformant activities, and improvement opportunities. These posts will be broken into two sections – how to do the analysis and how to configure the Process Optimization project.
Wrongly prioritizing an IT incident can have significant negative consequences for an organization. When IT incidents are not correctly prioritized, it can lead to a host of problems that may affect business operations, customer satisfaction, and overall productivity.
To mitigate the impact of wrongly prioritizing IT incidents, organizations should establish clear and well-defined incident prioritization processes.
Regular review and improvement of the prioritization process can contribute to better incident handling and overall organizational resilience.
We can use process mining on the ServiceNow platform to help analyze the prioritization of IT incidents. The same approach can be used to analyze how any work (Customer Service cases, HR cases, etc.) being managed on the ServiceNow platform is being reprioritized.
You can find other Use Case recordings here
How to do the analysis
This approach can be applied to any workflow (Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc.).
Open your project to the Analyst Workbench view.
First, we’ll look at P1 Incidents that have been downgraded. These priority downgrades could be valid, or they could be examples of non-conformant activity within the process.
Use the Transitions option in Advanced filters section of the Breakdown panel on the left-hand side of the workbench.
In the Advance filter on transitions window create the following conditions:
- Priority is 1 – Critical
- Eventually followed By
- Priority is not 1 – Critical
You can obviously adjust the conditions for your workflow and use case.
*Note: You may consider adding an additional activity of Followed by Priority is 1. This would isolate incidents that bounced from P1’s to something then back to a P1. Those are potentially someone trying to game an SLA clock.
Hit the Apply all chains button.
Our map is now narrowed down to just the incidents that started as Priority 1’s and then were reprioritized to something else.
At this point we can start digging into different scenarios.
Or save this as a filter set we can revisit later.
Click on Your filter sets at the top of the Breakdown panel on the left-hand side of the screen.
Give your filter set a name – Downgraded P1s and click save.
Now that you have this saved you can quickly apply this transition filter for different scenarios.
That is how we would analyze incidents where the Priority was downgraded for some reason. There is just as much reason to look at incidents in which the Priority was upgraded during the process. Very often these are good opportunities to improve an intake experience, to make sure we are asking the right qualifying questions upfront to ensure that we the urgency and impact information we need responded accordingly the first time.
What we’ll do in this use case is reverse or transition filter and add a time constraint to look for incidents where we are losing significant time before we apply the appropriate level of response and resources.
Click on the Clear all button in the Breakdown filters panel on the left-hand side of the screen.
Use the Transitions option in Advanced filters section of the Breakdown panel on the left-hand side of the workbench.
In the Advanced filter on transitions window enter the following conditions:
- Priority is one of (2 – High, 3 – Moderate, 4 – Low)
- Followed By
- Priority is 1 – Critical
For this situation we are going to add a time constraint to isolate only the incidents that take longer than a day for us to reprioritize and get the appropriate attention.
Click on the Add constraint button and add a From: 1 Days value.
Click the Apply all chains button.
The resulting map will show us the incidents that took longer than 1 day to be reprioritized to a P1. Critical time that was lost in the process. We can then use our breakdowns like Channel and Category to further isolate areas in which we can make improvements to the process.
How to configure the Process Optimization Project
To configure a project for this type of analysis you can follow the steps in this video.
The specific change you’d make would be to adjust your Activity definitions to use Priority as your Activity definition.
*Note: you may also want to add the Active field as an Activity to ensure you get accurate duration values for your Breakdowns.
Your Activity Definitions related list would look like this.
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Optimization Academy library of content
You can find other Process Optimization use cases here
Additional Resources
Process Optimization Essentials - Now Learning Course
