220-1102 Operational Procedures Practice Question
A help desk technician receives two tickets simultaneously. The first ticket is from the company's CEO reporting that their laptop will not turn on. The second ticket is from a sales representative requesting a password reset. According to IT best practices, what should the technician use to determine which ticket to work on first?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse 'user's job title' (option D) with 'business impact,' but the exam tests whether you understand that impact is determined by the issue's effect on operations, not the user's rank—a CEO's trivial request should not automatically supersede a critical outage affecting hundreds of users.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
The impact of the issue on business operations.
IT best practices prioritize tickets based on business impact. The CEO's laptop failure likely halts critical decision-making and operations, whereas a password reset for a sales rep is a lower-impact, routine request. This aligns with the CompTIA A+ 220-1102 objective on operational procedures, which emphasizes using a priority matrix that considers scope, urgency, and impact on business continuity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The alphabetical order of the user's last name.
Why it's wrong here
Alphabetizing by last name introduces an arbitrary, non-technical sorting criterion that has no relationship to incident severity, resource availability, or service-level agreements. It can just as easily bury a business-critical outage under a low-severity request, and it violates the core ITIL principle that prioritization must be driven by business need, not personal identifiers.
- ✗
The order in which the tickets were received.
Why it's wrong here
A first-in, first-out (FIFO) queue treats all tickets equally, but tickets are not equal in terms of disruption or risk. Chronological order ignores the urgency/impact matrix that triage requires, so a minor password reset could block a multi-user network failure from being investigated until it is too late, thereby failing to meet response SLA targets.
- ✓
The impact of the issue on business operations.
Why this is correct
Prioritizing by business impact directly aligns ticket handling with organizational continuity and revenue protection. Impact, combined with urgency, forms the standard priority matrix used in ITSM frameworks: a ticket affecting a core service used by hundreds of employees will be escalated ahead of a single-user cosmetic glitch, ensuring that the most operationally costly issues are resolved first.
- ✗
The user's job title.
Why it's wrong here
The user's job title does not reliably indicate the scope or criticality of the issue; a C-level's email signature problem may be low impact, while an entire shipping department's scanner failure halts logistics. Prioritization should be based on how many users are affected, which business functions are impaired, and whether there is a workaround, not on social or organizational rank.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1102 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1102 exam.