Prioritising competing requests: urgency vs impact
For anyone who handles requests from several people at once: service desk and facilities staff, office coordinators and team members with a shared inbox or ticket queue. No prerequisites. You'll separate impact (how much harm, to how many) from urgency (how soon the harm arrives), set a priority with a matrix, order a real-looking queue, tell people when their request will be handled, and decide when to re-prioritise or escalate. Definitions come from public vendor documentation (Atlassian's Jira Service Management guidance). Your team's own matrix and targets always win. Service desk staff using a PSA tool can go on to 'Tickets, priority and SLA clocks'.
- Level
- Beginner
- Length
- About 64 minutes
- Contents
- 5 lessons · final exam
- Status
- Published · updated 10 Oct 2026
Skills you'll practise
- Distinguish the impact of a request from its urgency, using written definitions
- Assign a priority to a request using an impact-urgency matrix
- Order a queue of competing requests and justify the order
- Write a short message telling a requester when their request will be handled and why
- Identify when new information means you should re-prioritise or escalate
Course outline
- 1.Distinguishing impact from urgencyLesson · 12 min
- 2.Assigning a priority with an impact-urgency matrixLesson · 12 min
- 3.Ordering a queue of competing requestsLesson · 13 min
- 4.Writing a message that tells the requester when and whyLesson · 10 min
- 5.Identifying when to re-prioritise or escalateLesson · 10 min
- 6.Prioritising competing requests: urgency vs impact: knowledge checkKnowledge check · 14 questions
- 7.Prioritising competing requests: urgency vs impact: practical exerciseKnowledge check · 1 question
- 8.Final exam10 questions · passing it completes the course, so people who already know the material can test out
Sources it draws on
The lessons and questions are written from these references, so learners can go back to the original.
- Atlassian Support (Jira Service Management Cloud): What are priority levels in Jira Service Management?
- Atlassian Support (Jira Service Management Cloud): How impact and urgency are used to calculate priority
- Atlassian Support (Jira Service Management Cloud): How should my team define impact and urgency of requests?
- Atlassian Support (Jira Service Management Cloud): Create an impact urgency priority matrix
- Atlassian Support (Jira Service Management Cloud): Best practices for automatically prioritizing requests
- Atlassian: Understanding incident severity levels (incident management guide)
See it with your own jobs and topics
Tell us about your team and we'll walk you through setup, from choosing jobs to your first skills check.