Every ticket gets a priority. It isn’t set by how urgently the ticket was worded — it’s set by impact, and understanding how that works explains why your ticket is where it is in the queue.
How priority is decided
Two questions, and nothing else:
How many people are affected? One person, a team, a campaign, or everyone.
Can they still work? Completely stopped, working with a workaround, or just inconvenienced.
The answers give the priority. “URGENT” in a subject line has no effect on this, and neither does phoning three times.
The four levels
P1 — Critical. Multiple people completely unable to work. The dialler down across a campaign. Total loss of connectivity. An active security incident. Complete power failure beyond the UPS window.
Response: within 15 minutes. Worked continuously until resolved or a workaround is in place.
P2 — High. A single person completely unable to work, or a group significantly degraded. Workstation won’t start. Account locked with no way in. One campaign’s system failing intermittently. Client deadline at risk today.
Response: within 1 hour. Target resolution same working day.
P3 — Standard. Work continues but is harder. A faulty headset with a spare available. One monitor of two not working. A software request. A password reset where you can still access other systems.
Response: within 4 working hours. Target resolution within 2 working days.
P4 — Low. Requests with no immediate impact. New equipment requests, non-urgent software, desk moves, documentation queries, anything scheduled for a future date.
Response: within 1 working day. Resolution scheduled by agreement.
Response time means the time until a human acknowledges your ticket and starts work — not the time until it’s fixed. Those are different, and conflating them is the main reason people think the queue is slower than it is.
Working hours
These times count during standard business hours. A P3 logged at 16:45 has its four-hour clock paused overnight and resumes the next morning.
P1 is the exception. Genuine critical incidents are worked whenever they happen, which is what the on-call number is for.
Why your P3 sits behind someone’s P1
Because IT is a small team and a P1 means people are sitting idle. When something critical is running, everything else waits. That’s the correct decision even when it’s frustrating from where you’re sitting.
It’s also why over-stating urgency backfires collectively. If everything is marked critical, nothing is, and the genuinely critical ticket loses its priority in the noise.
If your priority looks wrong
Say so — but say why, in the ticket. “This is P3 but I’m the only person who can process the Suzuki applications and the dealer is waiting” is a real argument, and it will usually get the priority raised.
“This is urgent” on its own isn’t an argument, and it won’t change anything.
You can also ask your team leader to raise it with IT management if a ticket is genuinely blocking business. Manager to manager, and reserve it for the cases that warrant it.
What actually speeds things up
Detail in the original ticket. A ticket with the desk number, asset tag, error message and what you already tried gets worked immediately. A ticket saying “not working” needs a reply, your response, and possibly a second exchange — each of those adds hours, and none of them are queue time.
One ticket per issue. Duplicates split the history and slow both copies.
Answering our questions quickly. A ticket waiting on you doesn’t progress, and the clock keeps running.
Checking Quick Fixes first. If your issue is on that list, you’ll be finished before a ticket would have been acknowledged.
What we won’t do
We won’t quietly downgrade your ticket without saying so. If the priority changes, you’ll see it on the ticket with a reason.
We won’t close a ticket without telling you. If we can’t reproduce a problem, we’ll say so and ask before closing.
We won’t leave a ticket unacknowledged. If you’ve had nothing after the response time above, something has gone wrong with the routing — phone the desk and quote your ticket number.
Read next: How to Log a Ticket, and Quick Fixes.
