Triage is the skill of deciding what to work on first, and it matters as much as technical troubleshooting ability. A new technician who treats every ticket as equally urgent burns out fast and, worse, sometimes leaves an actual emergency sitting behind three routine password resets.
Step 1: Read the whole ticket before touching anything
This sounds obvious and gets skipped constantly under time pressure. A ticket that looks like a simple password reset on the subject line sometimes turns out, three sentences in, to actually be about a locked account tied to a security concern. Read the full description before deciding how to respond.
Step 2: Clarify or reproduce, don't assume
If the ticket description is vague — and many are — a quick clarifying question before diving in usually saves more time than it costs. "Slow computer" could mean a dozen different things; five minutes establishing what's actually happening prevents wasted effort chasing the wrong problem.
Step 3: Check the scope
Is this affecting one person, or could it be a broader outage? A single user unable to print is a routine ticket. Five tickets in ten minutes all mentioning the same printer, or the same application, is a different situation entirely and should get escalated as a potential wider issue rather than worked as five separate unrelated tickets.
A simple priority framework
| Priority | Criteria | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Multiple users or business-critical system down | Email server outage, network-wide outage |
| High | Single user blocked from working entirely | Can't log in at all, laptop won't boot |
| Medium | Degraded but still functional | App running slowly, intermittent issue |
| Low | Cosmetic, or has an easy workaround | Icon missing, minor display glitch |
Step 4: Assign or escalate appropriately
Not every ticket belongs with you. Knowing when to escalate — and escalating with enough context that the next person doesn't have to start from zero — is itself a skill worth developing early, not a sign of failure.
Quick triage checklist
- Did I read the entire ticket, not just the subject line?
- Do I actually understand the problem, or am I assuming?
- Is this affecting one person or could it be systemic?
- Does the priority I'm assigning match the actual business impact, not just how the user phrased it?
- If I can't resolve this myself, am I escalating with enough detail to save the next person time?