There are five tables that manage the urgency, impact and priority values that are shown within a Service Request, Incident, Change Request, Problem or Release record. This section describes how these tables work.

Priority Groups Table

Each service in the Service Portfolio table is linked to a Priority Group.

By default there are six priority groups, but you can create additional ones as needed. They are applied based on the request type and each priority group can have its own set of urgencies, impacts, and priority matrix of values that result from all combinations of urgency and impact within a record. For example, the priority matrix for standard service requests has six levels of priority.

The Details tab in a Priority Group record, showing the Priority Group Details and Priority Matrix sections.

All of the wording in the priority matrix fields is defined for the specific priority group, so it is possible to have completely different priority lists for different services, as needed.

In order to set up a new priority group, the priority group must first just be created, named, and saved. Then, either the existing impact and urgency records can be updated to add that priority group to the available groups, or new impact and urgency records can be created and linked to the new group. That will make those values available to create the priority matrix.

Impacts Table

The Impacts table contains all possible Impact values that can be selected in the request tables. Each impact can be made available for one or more priority groups. Within a request, the available impacts are filtered based on the priority group of the Service for the request being contained in the Impact record's Available for Priority Groups field. The Order field defines the order in which the impact is listed in the drop-down list.

Table of Impacts, also showing the Available for Priority Groups, Order, and Status fields.

Urgencies Table

The Urgencies table contains a record for each possible urgency value that can be selected within a request record. Urgencies only appear in requests if the value in the request's Service Priority Group field overlaps with the Available for Priority Group field in the Urgency record.

Priority Values Table

The Priority Values table holds records for all the possible priority values used in the priority matrix, making it faster to set up new priority matrices. The default values are shown in the table below.

PriorityPriority LabelPriority Number
5 - Very LowVery Low5
4 - LowLow4
3 - MediumMedium3
3 - LowLow3
2 - MediumMedium2
2 - HighHigh2
1 - HighHigh1
1 - CriticalCritical1

Priorities Table

The Priorities Table is where these values are all put together to define the matrix and how priorities will be assigned based on the combination of impact and urgency. Priority records are best created while editing the Priority Group record, using the related table of priorities shown there.

An example of a change request priority record form.

To set up the matrix, create a Priority record and choose an impact and an urgency and decide what priority you want to be the result of that combination. Then create the other records. When creating a Priority record, the impacts and urgencies available for selection are filtered based on the priority group, which is why they need to be set up first. To change the logic that leads to a certain priority, the Impact and/or Urgency fields within the priority record can be modified.