Determining the business impact
When you report a problem to IBM®, you are asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you need to understand and assess the business impact of the problem that you are reporting.
Use the following criteria to assess the business impact of a problem:
- Severity 1
- The problem has a critical business impact. You are unable to use the program, resulting in a critical impact on operations. This condition requires an immediate solution.
- Severity 2
- The problem has a significant business impact. The program is usable, but it is severely limited.
- Severity 3
- The problem has some business impact. The program is usable, but less significant features (not critical to operations) are unavailable.
- Severity 4
- The problem has minimal business impact. The problem causes little impact on operations, or a reasonable circumvention to the problem was implemented.