Everyone knows the four severity levels common in most help desks: critical, high, medium, and low. And everyone knows of some situation that may be placed in each of these levels. But what everyone doesn't know is how to categorize the scenarios in the first place.
Is a network outage always categorized as critical? Is a typographical error in a GUI always categorized as low? Read on, and discover the secrets of determining how to categorize severity level scenarios for a new, or existing, help desk.
A Copycat Help Desk
When asked to categorize severity level scenarios for a help desk, a manager will invariably try to find examples of what other help desks are doing and copy their severity level categories. This approach, which may garner some success, is not the ideal situation because it has a number of inherent problems:
