How to measure Customer impact and Business Impact of Problems and prioritise

[Chaz_]

Hi,

I have the following use case where we are looking to capture customer and business impact of problems. These fields should be quantifiable fields which can be used to dictate the priority of the problem. It seems that the normal priority matrix is not suitable for this business requirement. Can anyone provide any suggestions on how this could be done without customising the system? I'm thinking broader like CSDM or if there is anything related to the Problem which could be used, or any underlying fields which could be utilised? Below is a summary of the requirement. Thanks.

As a problem manager, I want to add fields to the problem table and calculate the priority based on customer and business impact scores so that I can have an automated and accurate prioritization of issues.

Fields to Add:

1. Customer Impact Description - Ranking/Score

   • 5: High - Issues significantly impacting customers
   • 3: Medium - Issues noticeably impacting customers, not critical
   • 1: Low - Minor impact on customers
   • 0: No impact on customers

2. Business Impact Description - Ranking/Score

   • 5: High - Severe disruption to critical systems
   • 4: Significant financial costs
   • 3: Medium financial costs
   • 2: Minimal financial costs
   • 1: Low - Acceptable operational impact
   • 0: No operational impact

3. Priority - Calculated Field

   • High: Sum of impact scores ≥ 8
   • Medium: Sum of impact scores 5-7
   • Low: Sum of impact scores 2-4
   • Routine/Lowest: Sum of impact scores ≤ 1

[bammar]

Perhaps you can define your Business Services and within those records there are fields that cover how vital the system is to the organization. that is what I would do out of box. But for many core systems the answer to this can already be defined for Instance - Phone Lines could be a Business Service and theoretically you know if your phone lines go down - Customer impact is X and Business Impact is Y and so forth.  so if the Phone lines ever go down you already have a precalculated impact. It is good you dont go off Incidents because a subset of folks could open an incident for a system that is down but has thousands of customers.  So if you define your Business Services and maintain that list and associated them with the Problem the pre determined impact can be used. You could have some differences in the system depending on if its a full outage or a loss in functionality- AKA phone lines outbound are down but inbound work etc. 

Also rereading the question makes me thing your in an environment with multiple Problems at the same time.... Typically any outage requires the team managing that system or service to move immediately to resolve. Maybe my predetermined calculation can allow you to also use that for Prio - aka if a Phone Outage and an Email Outage happen at same time maybe your company wants to prio email - but then again if to diff groups work to fix then it may be moot as both can work concurrently to resolve. Hope my answer helps