Priority Matrix

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Myles Suer, writing for CIO magazine, states that IT leaders “need to focus upon things which provide value to customers”. These things include the time and effort spent on reducing business friction. When it comes to business priorities, nothing speaks louder than having available and reliable IT services that support business outcomes.

Of course, struggles to align IT with business needs are well documented. But if you take a different view—a view of how your handle incidents, changes, and requests—you’ll get a clearer picture on priorities from both sides.

To determine whether something is a value-add, you must define, prioritize, and measure the activities that do and don’t support such efforts.

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Covey’s matrix allows you to organize your priorities much better than before. The idea of using four quadrants to determine the priority of a task was introduced by American keynote speaker Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Prioritization is vital for IT and business needs: it tells us the relative importance of an incident, so you’ll know how quickly to respond to address it, and how long that effort might take. In ITSM, the most common prioritization model involves understanding impact and urgency. How IT responds, handles, and resolves any request or issue to the business and/or customers depends upon what both parties think about impact and urgency.

Though you can boil these components down to a simple mathematical equation, I caution you against this. Instead, looking at impact, urgency, and priority is more about making decisions about relative importance and context. These are items only you and your company can define, not an equation.

Let’s take a look at each of these factors and how context and relativity support them.

Impact

ITILv3 defines impact as a measure of the effect of an incident, problem, or change on business processes.

This effect could be positive: a return on investment or customer satisfaction such as a new feature or improvement to a product. Conversely, it could be very negative based on the degree of damage or cost that results. Loss of revenue, manhours, or customers following IT service downtime or poor performance are all negative effects.

Usually, impact would not be expressed in absolute terms, but rather a range or degree that is subject to the interpretation of your company’s context. This range might include:

  • Number of customers/users affected
  • Amount of lost revenue or incurred costs
  • Number of IT systems/services/elements involved

Priority Matrix Template Word

A variety of terms can help identify the impact, or effect, of an incident:

  • High, medium, low
  • Enterprise-wide, extensive/widespread, moderate/multi-user, individual/single user
  • Critical, significant, minor

Remember that words matter: all involved parties must share the same understanding of the scales you use. Clear, common understanding of the impact scale is the first step in effective prioritizing.

Urgency

Urgency is not about effect as much as it is about time. A function of time, urgency depends on the speed at which the business or the customer would expect or want something. That might be restoring service to normal operation, or developing, deploying, and delivering a new or updated service or product.

Priority Matrix Adhd

The longer that your company is willing to wait or can afford to be delayed, the lower your urgency. Anything that significantly affects your business from an operational, compliance, or financial perspective is generally more pressing than impacts on other perspectives. For example, a VIP’s request or outage to a cloud service covering a whole region would require shorter response and resolution times because it is a more urgent issue.

Like impact, urgency scales depend on your business context, needs, and risks. Common scales used in defining urgency are critical, major, medium, and minor.

Priority

Priority is the intersection of impact and urgency. Considering impact and urgency offers your company a clearer understanding of what is more important when it comes to a change: a request or an incident.

Remember that priority is relative: it defines what actions you’ll take, but these are never set in stone—they can vary as the context shifts.

PriorityPriority Matrix

Correlating impact and urgency can be easily done in a simple matrix, which can he hardcoded into your ITSM solutions for an easy way to determine service levels and track performance measures when treating incidents, problems, requests, or changes. Priority scales are usually defined as:

  • Critical/severe
  • Major/high
  • Medium
  • Minor/low

Here’s an example of an impact, urgency, and priority matrix. Anything that has both high impact and high urgency gets the highest priority, while low impact and low urgency results in the lowest priority.

Best practices for determining impact, urgency, and priority

No matrix is a one-size-fits-all framework. You’ll want to define urgency, impact, and priority alongside key stakeholders, then continually review your definitions as you encounter various scenarios. What might be high priority to the business might be much lower in the eyes of a third-party vendor; therefore, alignment across all agreements and contracts is critical.

One significant challenge I have come across: when users and support teams have the freedom to dictate the impact, urgency, and priority of their submitted issue, you’ll likely see a confusion of priorities. This freedom might be necessary for support teams to give situational context, but it can have a bad effect: most users will likely choose the highest level of priority even for mundane matters, like obtaining a gaming mouse for use even though their work involves spreadsheets.

Conversely, support teams are likely to choose lower levels due to their perception of effort involved or performance rating model applied, i.e., not wanting to restrict themselves to shorter resolution timelines that they are unlikely to meet.

To address this, you must use policy to clearly define what constitutes each scale and providing relevant examples to guide all teams involved towards a common picture and effective collaboration. Then, of course, you’ll have maintained focus on the particular components, situations, and requests that offer value to your customers.

Related reading

This article explains the Action Priority Matrix or activity prioritization matrix in a practical way, including a template. After reading you will understand the basics of this powerful effectiveness and time management tool. This article also contains a downloadable and editable Action Priority Matrix template.

People in organizations have busy diaries overflowing with appointments and various activities. The Action Priority Matrix helps people find their way to balance and helps prioritize options.

What is an Action Priority Matrix?

An Action Priority Matrix or APM makes it easier to make decisions and sets out clearly which activities must be finished on time and which activities can be omitted or performed at a later time. An Action Priority Matrix is a simple diagramming technique that helps you choose which activities to prioritize in order to make the most efficient use of your time. In an APM the Efforts of the activity (x-axis) are plotted perpendicularly on the Impact/ detailing (y-axis).

This creates four possibilities:

1. Quick wins

These activities are characterized by a high Impact in combination with a low Effort. They are the most attractive activities / projects that give good returns for relatively little effort. These activities can be completed routinely without affecting quality and they support the business continuity process. It is advisable to focus on these quick wins as much as you can.

2. Major projects

These activities have both a high Impact and a High Effort. They give good returns for a company but they take a long time to complete. Make sure that major projects do not crowd out the Quick Wins. It is important to pay much attention to these Major Projects, so that the execution of the activities can be mastered well. Working quickly and efficiently can be helpful in this.

3. Fill Ins

The so-called ‘fill ins’ have a low Impact and a low Effort. These are low-priority activities that can be dealt with at a later time. Often ‘fill ins’ stagnate activities with a higher priority. Eventually, these will have to be carried out. It is therefore advisable to make a list with ‘fill ins’ and you should only perform these tasks when you have got the time to do so.

4. Hard Slogs

Priority

The Hard Slogs or “thankless tasks” have a low Impact but require a high Effort. When a computer programme is not functioning properly and an employee spends all day trying to make this work, this must be seen as a waste of time and energy. It is therefore advisable to avoid Hard Slogs and outsource them to experts. If you do not do this, thankless and energy consuming tasks will yield low returns and there will be too little time for more important business.

Action Priority Matrix : Efficient use

In order to use an APM efficiently, it is recommended to use scores for impact from 0 to 10 in which ‘0’ represents no Impact and no Effort and ‘10’ represents maximum Impact and Maximum Effort. It is possible of course to use another scale. Using this score, the activities of the Action Priority Matrix can be plotted more carefully resulting in an easier selection with respect to priority.

Effect Long term of using the Action Priority Matrix

By using an APM, activities are sequenced in the right order based on priority and therefore time will be used more efficiently. This will have a positive effect in the long term.

Employees will therefore become more and more aware of time-consuming projects and will have a better understanding of activities that give good returns. This is why APM is an effective management tool: it improves the decision-making process and it minimizes stress.

Action Priority Matrix template

Get a head start with prioritizing options and make the most efficient use of your time with this ready to use Action Priority Matrix template.

Download the Action Priority Matrix template

Task Priority Matrix

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It’s Your Turn

What do you think? Is the Action Priority Matrix still applicable in today’s modern task management? Do you recognize the practical explanation or do you have more suggestions? What are your success factors for good priority task management?

Share your experience and knowledge in the comments box below.

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More information

Priority Matrix

  1. Sandler, L. (2007). Becoming an Extraordinary Manager: The 5 Essentials for Success. AMACOM.
  2. Covey, S. R., Merrill, A. R., & Merrill, R. R. (1995). First things first. Simon and Schuster.

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  1. Very informative and easily understandable.

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