Incident priority triage flowchart
An incident triage flowchart gives an operations team a shared way to make the first priority decision. This example begins with safety, because an immediate safety risk needs a different response from an ordinary service problem. It then separates a critical service outage from incidents with a workaround. Each route ends by recording the incident and the next action, so the decision is visible to the person taking over. The labels are deliberately generic: teams should replace Priority 1, Priority 2, and Priority 3 with their own definitions, escalation contacts, and service-level commitments. The same structure can support IT operations, facilities, or customer support incident handling.
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Scenario
An operations team needs a consistent first response for incoming incidents.
Key decisions
- Safety first: Route immediate safety risks to the emergency response path.
- Service impact: Treat an unavailable critical service as the highest operational priority.
- Workaround: Use availability of a workaround to distinguish Priority 2 from Priority 3.
- Record: Document the decision and the next action for every incident.
When to reuse this
Use this for internal operational incident triage and adapt the priority definitions to the team's own policy.
Frequently asked questions
Why check safety before service impact?
What does a workaround change?
Should every team use these priority labels?
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