Helped a client work through some issues with their support ticket workflow for a large enterprise Drupal website. Too many issues were being defined as high priority or urgent – making it difficult to spot what was a real emergency. We came up with these guidelines for priority assignment:
- Low – “Would be nice if” items, no immediate need to do this, work on it if you are out of other things to do/time is left in the budget. eg. Improving features that are already working well, back-end functions like non-essential module upgrades, improving processes that already work well, applying silver lining to clouds.
- Medium – Should do this item, if everything else in higher priorities is taken care of. Pre-planned upgrades with a schedule. Should not need to do any dual-entry (testing on development and immediately deploying on production) for this, can be migrated as part of a normal release cycle. Should be estimated prior to start and not go over budget. eg. Feature additions, upgrades, etc. Most day-to-day operations should go here.
- High – Must do this, during regular working hours, (optionally) to a defined timeframe. May require a hotfix to production. eg. New product page updates or contact phone numbers, landing pages/blog posts to respond to time-sensitive crisis.
- Urgent – Stop work on other tickets at lower priorities and focus all attention on this. It must be fixed as soon as possible, even if that means working late, going over hours or delaying other tasks until this is done. Will probably require a hotfix to production once a solution has been identified and tested on development. eg. Bugs that are preventing products from being accessed from certain views, broken download links to legally required documentation.
- Immediate – Wake people up in the middle of the night if you need to, this is a serious issue that is causing business to be affected or leaving the company unable to function. eg. Contact form is not routing mail, serious server crash, data loss, building literally on fire.
Depending on the organization, Urgent and Immediate issues may also trigger a page to senior management and require providing a status updates to them before the issue can be signed off as completed.