Setting Priorities

In an ideal world, every problem should be chased all the way to ground and completely resolved. But if you try to chase too many problems at once, you will be ineffective. It is only possible to really concentrate on one thing at a time; multitasking is a myth. The question is which problem is going to get focused attention first. In the real world, it is usually the case that we have to decide which problems are pursued first and most aggressively.

Two factors to consider are:

• The frequency with which events occur.
• The cost of each event

Counting the frequency is going to depend on having good incident reporting so that we can make valid comparisons between problems. Recurrences of the same problem may be described different ways, or even have different symptoms, so the analysis of incident reports needs to be sophisticated enough to group related incidents together.

The cost of each occurrence may be monetary, but it is most likely to be counted in terms of staff time to resolve and lost productivity while the symptoms are active.