Work Classification and Priority

ISS uses several concepts to understand, organize, and prioritize work.

Three different questions should not be confused:

1. What type of work is this?
2. Where does the work fall within Plan, Build, or Operate?
3. How should this work be prioritized against other work?

ISS uses both a departmental Hierarchy of Priority and ticket-level priorities to help employees and managers answer those questions consistently.

Work Classification

Common categories of ISS work include:

Service Requests

Normal customer requests for assistance, information, equipment, access, or another standard technology need. Service Requests are most often tickets.

Incidents

Unplanned interruptions or reductions in the quality of an existing service. Incidents are most often tickets.

Problems

A problem represents an underlying cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents. Problems often originate from tickets, incident trends, monitoring, or other operational observations.

Repeatedly restoring the same service without addressing why it continues to fail may resolve individual incidents without resolving the underlying problem.

Problem identification may generate planning, improvement, or Build work intended to prevent future incidents.

Changes

A change is a planned modification that may affect a service or service offering. Changes can originate from tickets and projects.

Maintenance, projects, incident resolution, security remediation, and continual improvement may all result in changes.

Sustainment and Stewardship

Recurring or planned work necessary to keep services reliable, secure, current, and supportable.

Examples may include:

• Patching
• Software upgrades
• Certificate renewal
• Hardware lifecycle replacement
• Preventive maintenance
• Configuration review
• Routine administrative work

Projects

Planned bodies of work that require deliberate coordination, milestones, ownership, and scheduling.

Projects are one method ISS uses to create, replace, upgrade, or significantly improve services and service offerings.

Plan, Build, and Operate

Work classification describes what the work is.

Plan, Build, and Operate describe where the work is occurring within the ISS operating model.

Examples include:

Some work may move through more than one operating area.

For example, repeated incidents identified through Operate may result in analysis during Plan and ultimately lead to a project, change, or service improvement in Build.

ISS Hierarchy of Priority

ISS uses a common Hierarchy of Priority to help employees understand which work should normally take precedence when competing demands exist.

The hierarchy provides a shared language for communicating the importance of work and coordinating resources.

The hierarchy is:

0 — Outages
1 — Tickets / Customers
2 — Projects
3 — Sustainment / Stewardship

Employees should normally work in this order unless their manager provides different direction.

0 — Outages

Outages are the highest-priority work in ISS.

An outage is a significant disruption that affects an entire service, a large number of people, or a critical College operation.

Employees should stop other work and assist with outages affecting services for which they are the:

• Service Owner
• Technical Lead
• Backup Technical Lead
• Incident Coordinator
• Otherwise assigned support resource

Outages are most often part of Operate because the immediate objective is restoring service.

The hierarchy also gives employees a common language.

If someone says:

“I have an outage and need your help.”

that communicates that the work takes precedence over normal assignments unless a manager directs otherwise.

1 — Tickets / Customers

Tickets and customer work include normal incidents, service requests, and other customer needs.

A request may be critical or urgent to the customer without having enough College-wide impact to be considered an outage.

This work is most often part of Operate.

Employees should normally address Ticket / Customer work after outage responsibilities and before lower-priority work, subject to assignments and direction from their manager.

2 — Projects

Project work includes tasks and milestones assigned as part of an approved project.

Projects are most often part of Build.

Project work should be deliberately scheduled. Managers should protect time for project assignments so that important Build work is not continually displaced by normal operational demands.

Managers may direct an employee to continue working on a project while other team members handle tickets or participate in an outage.

The hierarchy establishes the normal order of work, but managers remain responsible for assigning resources based on the needs of the College.

3 — Sustainment / Stewardship

Sustainment and stewardship include recurring, preventive, and planned work required to keep services stable, secure, current, and supportable.

Examples may include:

• Routine maintenance
• Lifecycle work
• Preventive tasks
• Documentation maintenance
• Capacity reviews
• Service health reviews
• Planned administrative activities
• Other recurring service responsibilities

This work is most often part of Operate and is frequently scheduled well in advance.

Although Sustainment / Stewardship appears fourth in the hierarchy, this work is essential.

Continually delaying sustainment can eventually create:

• Incidents
• Outages
• Security risk
• Technical debt
• Reliability problems
• Larger future projects

Managers should therefore ensure that sustainment work receives appropriate protected time.

The Hierarchy Is a Common Language

The ISS Hierarchy of Priority is intended to help employees quickly understand competing work.

For example:

• “I have an outage and need your help.”
• “I have a ticket I need help with.”
• “I am working on a project milestone today.”
• “I have sustainment work scheduled this afternoon.”

Each statement communicates something about where that work falls in the department’s normal order of priority.

The hierarchy is a guide for employees, not a substitute for management judgment.

Managers may deliberately:

• Protect project time.
• Assign specific employees to continue Build work.
• Distribute outage responsibilities across the team.
• Reassign ticket responsibilities.
• Protect scheduled sustainment activity.
• Adjust priorities based on College needs.

Employees should follow the hierarchy unless their manager has provided a different assignment or priority.

Ticket Priority

Within 1 — Tickets / Customers, the ticket system provides an additional layer of prioritization to help teams determine which requests and incidents should normally be addressed first.

Tickets may be assigned one of five priorities:

• Low
• Medium
• High
• Critical
• Project

Low, Medium, High, and Critical are generally determined by considering impact and urgency.

Impact

Impact asks:

How broadly does this issue affect the College?

ISS generally considers impact in three levels.

High Impact

The issue affects:

• An entire service or system
• A business unit or department
• A location
• A significant College operation

Medium Impact

The issue affects:

• Multiple users
• A defined group of users

Low Impact

The issue affects:

• A single user

Impact is not simply a measure of how important the issue feels to the person reporting it.

It considers the scope of the effect on the College.

Urgency

Urgency asks:

How severely is the issue preventing the affected people from working?

ISS generally considers urgency in three levels.

High Urgency

The affected customer or group can no longer perform primary work functions.

Medium Urgency

Work functions are impaired, but a workaround is available.

Low Urgency

The issue is inconvenient but does not significantly prevent normal work.

Combining Impact and Urgency

Impact and urgency are considered together to determine the appropriate ticket priority.

This model helps ISS prioritize work consistently and reduces the tendency to prioritize requests solely by:

• Who submitted them
• How strongly urgency is expressed
• Who contacts ISS most frequently
• The order in which requests arrive

For example, an issue may be extremely important to one customer while affecting only that person and having an available workaround.

That issue still deserves appropriate attention, but its organizational impact is different from a problem preventing an entire department from performing its primary work.

Managers and team members may adjust ticket priority when additional College context, risk, security concerns, deadlines, or operational needs justify doing so.

Critical Tickets and Outages Are Not the Same Thing

A Critical ticket priority does not automatically make the work an Outage in the ISS Hierarchy of Priority.

The two concepts serve different purposes.

Ticket priority helps teams order work within the ticket system.

0 — Outage communicates that a significant service disruption requires immediate departmental attention.

Many outages will involve Critical tickets, but the terms should not be treated as interchangeable.

Project Priority

Project is different from Low, Medium, High, and Critical.

It is not determined through the impact-and-urgency matrix.

The Project priority is used when a ticket represents work that has been assigned as part of an approved project.

Changing a ticket to Project effectively moves the work from:

1 — Tickets / Customers

to:

2 — Projects

within the ISS Hierarchy of Priority.

This allows project tasks to remain in the ticket system when appropriate while making clear that the work should be managed according to the project’s:

• Plan
• Milestones
• Assigned responsibilities
• Due dates
• Schedule

Project tickets should therefore be worked according to the project plan rather than treated as normal ticket-queue work.

Priority Requires Judgment

No priority model can account for every situation.

Employees should use the hierarchy, ticket priorities, impact, and urgency to make consistent decisions, but managers remain responsible for balancing the needs of the College.

Our goal is not simply to work whatever appears most urgent at the moment.

It is to make deliberate decisions about where our time provides the greatest value while continuing to support the people and services that depend on ISS.