Several incidents are open at once and the support team must decide which to work on first. On what basis should the order be decided?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
Draft — not checked yet. This question was written from the published exam objectives and cites the clause it comes from, but nobody has yet read it against that clause and signed for it.
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The options
Not correct The seniority of the person who reported each incident
Seniority may correlate with impact but is not the criterion. Prioritising by who is shouting loudest is exactly what an agreed prioritisation scheme is designed to prevent.
Not correct The order in which the incidents were logged, so that no user waits longer than another
First-in-first-out is fair-looking but ignores impact entirely: a single logged-first password reset would outrank an outage affecting a whole business function.
Correct An agreed classification scheme, so that the incidents with the highest business impact are worked first
Correct. Incidents are categorised and then prioritised using a scheme agreed in advance — normally weighing how much damage the incident does against how quickly that damage grows — so the ordering is consistent rather than personal.
Not correct How technically complex each incident appears to be to diagnose
Complexity affects effort and possible escalation, not priority. A trivial fault with wide business impact still outranks a hard fault affecting nobody.
Why
Priority is derived, not asserted: incidents are categorised and then prioritised using an agreed classification scheme, so that those with the highest business impact are resolved first. Consistency matters more than any individual judgement, because it is what makes agreed target resolution times meaningful.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
- What it says
- Incidents are prioritized based on an agreed classification, to ensure that incidents with the highest business impact are resolved first.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.