Determine the business impact of your problem

When you report a problem to IBM®, you are asked to supply a severity level. Therefore, you must understand and assess the business impact of the problem you are reporting.

Use the following criteria to determine the business impact of your problem:

Table 1. Severity level and their description
Severity Business impact
Severity 1 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 Significant business impact: The program is usable but is severely limited.
Severity 3 Some business impact: The program is usable with less significant features (not critical to operations) unavailable.
Severity 4 Minimal business impact: The problem causes little impact on operations, or a reasonable circumvention to the problem is implemented.