What is Activity Prioritisation?
To reform IT Support, ticket activity must be timely, reliable, and aligned to expectations.
As featured in ServiceTalk (itSMF) and SupportWorld (HDI), activity prioritisation is how it is achieved. A natural enhancement to how support teams already work, it is the main practice that Opimise was formed to introduce.
Our goal is for activity prioritisation to supersede ticket prioritisation - for it to become the usual approach.
The best form of activity prioritisation is in use of ticket lifecycle statuses. Each status has a configured threshold that guides onward progression.
Two other things are needed. Firstly, a full set of statuses that cover all support scenarios. Secondly, teams must change a ticket's statuses on each touch.
Progression threshold timestamps are then continually adjusted according to changing scenarios, dynamically sequencing all required activity in the most appropriate way possible. As long as workload queues are adequately covered, timeliness becomes reliable, aligned precisely with how an IT organisation wishes to deliver support.
The question of “what next” becomes a thing of the past. No ticket gets forgotten, and managers can oversee progression breaches “by exception”, mobilising teamwork if necessary. Other benefits are high performing Resolution SLA’s that are measured with absolute accuracy, plus potential for dynamic expectations management, and a range of other new operational capabilities.
From one organisation to the next, extensive commonality exists in the spread of “meaningful” statuses that form the real ticket lifecycle, making sense of hundreds or thousands of required support tasks. Your teams probably already use some statuses, so status-based activity prioritisation is just a small adjustment.
You can read more about the practice, including advanced capabilities, in our community-based mini-course, Perfect Prioritisation in 10-minutes, or by reading the feature article written for ServiceTalk magazine (itSMF): "An end to chased tickets - is there a silver bullet?" (issue #08).