Impact Matrix

The Impact measures the potential effect of an incident, problem, service request, or change on the business user, service, or CI.

A ticket's Impact is an auxiliary parameter used to determine its key aspect – its Priority. The Impact Matrix helps determine an incident's impact in a more accurate and objective way, and thus makes the subsequent prioritization more effective.

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To determine an incident's Impact using the Impact Matrix, set the itsm.itsm_incident.impact_matrix_is_enabled system property to true.

The Impact Matrix does not apply to infrastructure incidents: because of their specifics, their Impact needs to be determined by the assigned agent manually.

The Impact Matrix table (itsm_dl_impact) provides a qualitative evaluation of an incident's impact based on the following parameters:

• Business criticality of the selected Service – the metric of how crucial the disruption of this service can be for the business. The options are Low or High.
• Event scope – the measure of how widespread the event's impact has been on the system, infrastructure, or users. The definition depends on how your organization applies ITSM. For example, an incident having the Global scope can mean that it affects all users or servers, while an incident with the Local scope affects just one user or server.
• Service outage extent – the extent of the unplanned reduction in the quality of the provided service. The outage extent can be Partial/Degradation or Full.
• whether the Caller is marked as VIP. If the Caller is not specified or found, the impact calculation considers that the Caller is not VIP.

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Role required: matrix_manager.

Impact calculation for incidents

Per the Impact Matrix, an incident's Impact has the following scale:

1. Low

2. Medium

3. High

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   The maximum possible Impact value in the system is Very high, but it cannot be set for an incident using the Impact Matrix. This is because only major infrastructure incidents have the Very high impact. It is set for them automatically when the Major incident checkbox is selected.

For the Impact to be calculated using the Impact Matrix, its Service outage extent, Event scope, Service, and Caller fields must be completed. The calculation is done as follows:

Event scope / Service outage extent	Partial/Degradation	Full
Local	Impact: Low	Impact: Medium
Global	Impact: Medium	Impact: High

The Impact calculation also includes the following:

• High Business criticality of the service increases the Impact by one point.
• The Caller being a VIP increases the Impact by one point.

Expand the Impact Matrix

Add new options

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You can customize the Impact Matrix based on your business tasks and priorities. To do so, you can add more options for the Event scope, Service outage extent and Business criticality fields.

To add a new option, complete the following steps:

1. Open any incident record that has the Event scope and Service outage extent fields. To add a new option for the Business criticality field, open any service record.
2. Right-click the title of the field you need and in the context menu that appears, select Configure field.
3. In the Related Lists area, select the Choice tab.
4. Click New and fill in the fields.
5. Click Save or Save and exit to apply the changes.

See the Choice Fields article to learn how to create choice options.

After you have added a new option, perform the same steps for the Impact Matrix (itsm_dl_impact) table.

Add new Impact combinations

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After adding new field options, expand the Impact Matrix with new combinations. Complete the following steps:

1. Navigate to Matrices Configuration → Impact Matrix.
2. Click New and fill in the form fields.
3. Click Save or Save and exit to apply the changes.

Impact Matrix form fields

Field	Mandatory	Description
Service outage extent	Y	Specify the Service outage extent value for the new Impact combination.
Event scope	Y	Specify the Event scope value for the new Impact combination.
Business criticality	Y	Specify the service's Business criticality value for the new Impact combination.
Caller is VIP	N	Select the checkbox for the new Impact combination to consider that the Caller is VIP.
Impact	Y	Specify the Impact value that will be set for an incident if it matches this new combination of values.

Repeat these steps until your matrix covers all the possible combinations of the Event scope, Service outage extent, and the Caller is VIP values.