In this week’s blog, I’d like to discuss priorities and applying them both in life and also within the workplace.
The definition of Priority from yourdictionary.com
priority
noun
pl. -·ties
- the fact or condition of being prior; precedence in time, order, importance, etc.
-
- a right to precedence over others in obtaining, buying, or doing something
- an order granting this, as in an emergency
- something to be given prior attention
In life priorities are essential, health over wealth, necessity over nice to have. Without these, there would be absolute chaos. There are many instances where priorities are key, one of the main examples that come to mind is an Emergency Room reception. Without priorities, you would have bumps and bruises seen to before cuts and broken bones or even life-threatening injuries. ER staff have to make an immediate call on the priority of a patient – this may mean that it takes some other patients longer to be seen, but if a patient is in imminent danger, they need to be prioritised.
Within our Support Desk at Lucidity we maintain four main priorities, starting from our Highest Priority and working our way down, we have:
Critical Business Impact (Severity 1) – A major system or component failure that critically affects the ability of your entire business (All Users at All sites) to access all of Lucidity’s cloud services
High Business Impact (Severity 2) – A minor system or component failure that is not a Severity 1 (ie not affecting all users at all sites) however still significantly affecting the ability of your business to access some or all of Lucidity’s cloud services
Medium Business Impact (Severity 3) – A system or component failure that affects a group of users in their ability to access some or all of Lucidity’s cloud services.
Low Business Impact (Severity 4) – A system or component failure that affects a single or group of users in their ability to access some of Lucidity’s cloud services.
Focusing on the highest priority first allows us to resolve the most pressing matters, such as issues that impact an entire business or instances that hold a high-cost value to our customer if not resolved quickly.
When a ticket or call comes into our Support Centre, our Triage agent will review the ticket and where necessary, contact the requester to obtain more information, including:
- How many users are affected?
- Is there a workaround?
- The Customer’s Priority
Using the above information, we can then apply our priority process to the ticket, whilst also taking the customer's sense of urgency into account.
Too often in life we can feel overwhelmed by having too much to do, however breaking down the long list of never-ending “to do’s” into priorities can make these tasks seem smaller and more achievable.
One of my favourite YouTube videos that helped me put life in perspective and allowed me to focus on what is most important to me is the Rocks, Pebbles and Sand story.
It highlights how much more we can get out of life by focussing on the most important things first (rocks), while still getting around to everything else (pebbles & sand). It is well worth 2 minutes of your time.
Jarred Foster
