Prioritizing by impact and urgency: ending the debate that everything is urgent

At almost every service desk you hear it: "this one is urgent." One person after another marks their request as urgent, and before long every request is top priority. At that point, priority means nothing, and the team ends up working based on who shouts loudest instead of what has the most effect. This article shows how a simple impact and urgency matrix ends that debate, and how to agree it with the business.

Why "everything is urgent" happens

Without a clear agreement on what makes something urgent, everyone falls back on their own gut feeling. A user whose report will not generate feels that just as urgent as one who cannot log in at all. Both are right from their own perspective, but the effect on the organization differs enormously. Without a shared yardstick, the service desk has nothing to fall back on except negotiating request by request. That costs time and undermines trust.

Impact and urgency: the two axes that make the difference

An impact and urgency matrix works with two simple questions. Impact: how many people or processes does this affect, and how badly? Urgency: how fast does this need solving before the damage grows? The combination determines priority, not the tone of the request.

Impact: how big is the damage

Impact is about scale. One user who lost their password has low impact. An application down for an entire department has high impact. Also look at the process affected: an outage in payroll processing weighs differently than one in a test environment.

Urgency: how much time is there

Urgency is about speed. Can this wait until tomorrow without extra damage, or does the problem grow if nothing happens? A slow system is annoying but usually not urgent. A system at risk of losing data is.

Combining the matrix

Put impact and urgency in a grid of three by three: low, medium, high on both axes. High impact and high urgency is priority one, low impact and low urgency is priority four or lower. The rest fills in naturally. The beauty is that the matrix carries the conversation, not the person answering the phone.

How to agree the matrix with the business

A matrix that only lives on paper within IT gets pushed aside at the first argument. To make it stick, the business helps decide what impact and urgency mean for their processes.

• Name the critical processes together. Let the business indicate which systems weigh heaviest, rather than IT guessing.
• Define impact in concrete terms. Agree what "many users" and "critical process" actually mean, with numbers or examples, not vague words.
• Tie urgency to response times. Record for each combination how fast the service desk responds and resolves.
• Write the matrix down and share it widely. Put it on a single page and share it with everyone who logs requests, not just IT.
• Review the matrix periodically. Today's priorities are not next year's. Revisit the matrix with the business once a year.

Once the matrix is agreed, the conversation shifts: no longer "why isn't my request urgent," but "what impact and urgency does this have according to our agreement."

What it delivers

With a clear impact and urgency matrix, the endless negotiation over what counts as urgent stops. The service desk objectively decides what comes first, and the business knows what to expect. That saves discussion time and lets the team spend energy solving instead of explaining. That is achieving more with the same people: by choosing more wisely what goes first.

Frequently asked questions

What if a user disagrees with the assigned priority? Explain the impact and urgency the priority was based on. Because the matrix was agreed in advance, it is no longer a debate about arbitrariness but about a clear rule.

Does every request need to go through the matrix? Yes, that is what makes the approach strong. Allow exceptions and everyone slides back into negotiating.

Does this work for small teams without an ITSM tool? Absolutely. A matrix on a half sheet of paper next to the phone works just as well as an automated rule in a tool. What matters is the agreement, not the technology.

Want an impact and urgency matrix that fits your organization and that the business genuinely supports? book a call and we will work out together which impact and urgency apply to your processes.

Further reading

• IT service management (Wikipedia)
• Incident management (Wikipedia)