The profiles of use are only indirectly influenced by the service provider. The major difference between impact and severity is that impact depends on how customers are using a service. Similarly, such measurements are much easier to make after the fact than during investigation and resolution. The incident whose resolution requires five technicians and ten hours of work is more severe than the incident requiring 1 technician and ten minutes.Īs for impact, severity should ultimately be measurable in financial terms.
The failure of a device costing 100,000 to replace is more severe than the failure of a device costing 10,000. A failed disk that may be replaced using a hot swap is an incident less severe than one requiring the shutdown and opening of a computer chassis.
A number of examples illustrate this definition. Severity measures the effort and expense required by the service provider to manage and resolve an event or incident. The service provider must make such assessments early in the management of events and incidents, even if the customer provides no input at all. However, both the service provide and the customer may together assess the probable or potential impact of an incident. Only the customer can really assess the actual impact of an incident. There is an importance nuance here, however. Whatever means are used to measure the probable or actual impact of an incident or event, the resulting assessment should be recognizable and verifiable by the customers. There are numerous indicators of the probable level of impact, including the number of users touched by the incident, the profiles of those users, the role that affected components play in the delivery of services and the value of those services. Therefore, it tends to be reduced to a rather arbitrary scale, such as high, middle or low. Ultimately, impact should be measurable in financial terms, but this is often difficult to do or impractical during the resolution of an incident or event. Services are intended to provide value to customers incidents diminish that value. Since an incident or event normally has a negative influence on service customers, impact is a measure of the loss of value to the customers. We propose that the term impact should describe the influence of an event or incident on the customers, while the term severity should describe its influence on the service provider. I propose here a simple way of distinguishing severity from impact, one that is loosely derived from ITIL ®.Įvents or incidents may be viewed from two perspectives: how do they influence the customers of services and how do they influence the providers of services. However, some practitioners appear to use this term interchangeably with other attributes of events and incidents, such as impact or priority. Severity is normally used to describe an event or an incident. This might be due to multiple industry standards, to poetic license, to ignorance or, indeed, to laziness. Some terms, however, continue to be used in diverse ways, only adding to the confusion of those who attempt to follow industry standards. To this end, the definitions provided by ITIL ® are most often cited.
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financial, safety, compliance with legal requirements, customer satisfaction, speed of response, etc.Most service management practitioners will agree that there is an advantage to using a shared and a standard terminology when speaking of how to manage services. The actual definition of High Impact or Medium Urgency will be defined by each organization, based on variables that are important to that business (e.g.
Resources can be in the form of people, infrastructure, costs, etc. The urgency of a change is a way of expressing the level of resources that should be applied to the change being considered. The impact of a change describes the degree of 'disturbance' that a change may have on the infrastructure or what impact on the business not performing the change may have on the organization. These levels are determined by understanding the combined impact and urgency of the change being considered. ITIL Change Priority levels are typically set at levels such as High, Medium, Low and Urgent or Emergency. As part of the Change Management process being able to establish the change priority is part of the change evaluation. ITIL Change Priority levels can be defined using a variety of variables. The contents of this subportal of published by the Quintica Group Your independent source of ITSM information.
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