What this means for your practice
Define priority through impact and urgency, with examples from the actual service. Provide a review route when the reporter and support team disagree.
An example to discuss with your team
Classify a cosmetic issue, a partial outage and a failed primary enquiry route using the proposed matrix. Check for consistent results.
How to review the arrangement
Ask the supplier to classify a cosmetic issue, partial outage and failed primary contact route. Do staff reach consistent conclusions? Agree who can change a priority and why. Clear examples make escalation more useful than relying on whichever reporter uses the strongest language.
Use examples staff recognise
Build the priority discussion around your actual services. A minor wording correction, a problem affecting one optional download and a failure of the main enquiry form have different consequences. Ask reception and the supplier how they would report and assess each one, including whether a usable alternative exists.
Agree who can change a priority when new information emerges or when the reporter and support team disagree. The initial label should not prevent the team from recognising a wider problem. Distinguish restoring a broken service from developing an improvement that has not yet been commissioned. Keep enough explanation with the ticket for a covering colleague to understand the decision. Review repeated disagreements to see whether the examples or contact route need improving. A useful priority process directs attention to business impact; it should not depend on how forcefully someone writes 'urgent' in a subject line.
How to check the result
Measure reprioritised tickets and the reasons for disagreement.
Turn reading into a next step
Your action checklist
Work through these checks with your team or supplier. Tick the ones you have resolved and leave unknowns open.
Record what you know, what is still missing and the answer you need from your team or supplier.
Use project decisions only, without personal, patient or confidential details. Entries stay in this page and are not submitted to Kay & Co. Copy or download before leaving; this page does not save your notes.
Further reading
These sources provide background for the topic. The practice examples and checklist are illustrative planning suggestions from Kay & Co.
Related guides
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