Many IT service desks still operate with a “very important person” (VIP) list (after all, it’s a long-held IT support best practice). It’s likely a roster of executives and their assistants who get expedited support, “white glove” provisioning, and maybe even the benefit of the doubt when they complain. It’s been a fixture of IT service management (ITSM) practice for as long as I can remember (although my team did change things in my last real job in the noughties – adding the concept of “very important roles” (VIRs)).
Surely, given the importance of technology to business operations and outcomes, the VIP list is showing its age. And more importantly, it’s likely getting in the way of something more useful to your organization.
The Real Problem with VIP-Based Prioritization
The VIP list was never really about service quality – it was about risk management. Specifically, the risk of upsetting the wrong person. Especially “important” people. It’s a politically understandable position, but it’s a poor basis for incident and service request prioritization logic.
The world has changed significantly since the VIP IT support concept took hold. Hybrid working, distributed teams, and years of digital transformation mean that the organizationally important people are not always the people whose IT issues are operationally critical.
A VP whose laptop freezes during a Microsoft Teams call is inconvenienced. Whereas a warehouse coordinator whose handheld scanner stops syncing at 6am can halt an entire day’s fulfillment operation. Those two incidents are not equal. But a traditional VIP list treats them that way – or worse, inverts the resolution priority entirely.
What Are Very Important Roles (VIRs)?
The concept of “very important roles” isn’t new – I was advocating for it over 20 years ago (after my team adopted it) – but it’s never really taken hold in mainstream ITSM practice. It’s a missed opportunity, IMO, and one that’s becoming more costly as IT infrastructure is ever more tightly woven into business operations.
The idea is straightforward: rather than prioritizing based on who has the need, you prioritize based on the role being performed.You’re not building a list of important people. You’re building a map of operational dependency.
Why VIRs Align IT Support with Business Impact
What makes a VIR will differ by organization, and might perhaps be seasonal, but examples include:
Frontline logistics and fulfillment roles
Where devices, scanners, or routing systems sit on the critical path of physical operations – especially relevant as same-day delivery expectations have tightened service level agreements (SLAs) across supply chains.
AI-assisted knowledge workers
These roles might depend on specific integrations, model access, or data pipelines to do their jobs. When those break, it’s not just inconvenient – it can corrupt outputs or stall decisions.
Payroll and HR operations
These roles remain stubbornly time-critical, and failure has direct regulatory and employee relations consequences.
Cybersecurity and incident response roles
This one likely matters more than ever. If your security operations (SOC) analyst can’t access tooling during an active security incident, everything else becomes secondary.
Customer-facing digital roles
For example, community managers, live support agents, and digital campaign teams whose IT failures are visible externally, not just internally.
The common thread with these roles isn’t seniority. It’s operational exposure and time sensitivity.
How to Identify and Build Your VIR List
Getting a VIR list right requires something the traditional VIP list never needed: genuine business engagement. You cannot build a VIR map from within the IT department. Instead, you need conversations with operational leads, business unit managers, and the people actually doing the work.
The questions to ask are practical ones:
- Where does IT failure create a downstream cascade?
- Which roles become exponentially more critical at specific points in the day, week, month, or year?
- Where does IT failure have external consequences – for customers, regulators, or partners?
If you have business relationship managers or embedded IT partners in business units, this is exactly the kind of insight they should be surfacing. If you don’t have these relationships, building a VIR list is a compelling reason to start.
Integrating VIRs into Incident and Request Prioritization
VIRs don’t replace impact and urgency as prioritization criteria – they help sharpen them. A well-constructed VIR list gives your IT service desk the context to make better real-time decisions without needing to escalate every borderline call. It also gives you something defensible when a senior stakeholder asks why their ticket wasn’t jumped to the front of the queue.
Crucially, it shifts the conversation from “Who do we want to keep happy?” to “Where does IT failure genuinely hurt the business?” It’s a more honest and useful framing.
Do You Know Your Organization’s VIRs?
Every organization has them. The payroll analyst who runs the month-end close. The compliance officer who submits regulatory reports on a fixed deadline. The field engineer whose mobile tooling is the only thing standing between a client and an SLA miss.
The question isn’t whether your VIRs exist. It’s whether your IT service desk knows who they are – and whether your prioritization logic reflects that knowledge.
If it doesn’t, your VIP list might be protecting the wrong people from the adverse effects of technology failure.
FAQs
VIR stands for “very important role.” Rather than prioritizing IT support based on who has the issue, a VIR approach prioritizes based on the role being performed and its operational importance. It’s a map of operational dependency rather than a roster of senior people.
A VIP list prioritizes support for organizationally important people, typically executives and their assistants. A VIR list prioritizes the roles whose IT failure causes the most operational or time-critical damage, regardless of seniority. The shift moves the question from who IT wants to keep happy to where IT failure genuinely hurts the business.
The VIP list was always more about risk management, specifically the risk of upsetting important people, than about service quality. Hybrid working, distributed teams, and years of digital transformation mean the organizationally important people are not always the ones whose IT issues are operationally critical. A frozen laptop on a video call is rarely as damaging as a frontline tool failing at the wrong moment.
You can’t build a VIR list from inside the IT department. It takes conversations with operational leads, business unit managers, and the people doing the work, asking where IT failure creates a downstream cascade, which roles become critical at specific points in the day, week, month, or year, and where failure has external consequences for customers, regulators, or partners. Business relationship managers or embedded IT partners are well placed to surface this.
No. VIRs don’t replace impact and urgency, they sharpen them. A well-constructed VIR list gives the service desk context to make better real-time decisions without escalating every borderline call, and gives IT something defensible when a senior stakeholder asks why their ticket wasn’t jumped to the front of the queue.
So, what do you think of the concept of a VIR list? Do you use one already? If you do, I would love to know which roles you consider VIRs.
Further Reading
Stephen Mann
Principal Analyst and Content Director at the ITSM-focused industry analyst firm ITSM.tools. Also an independent IT and IT service management marketing content creator, and a frequent blogger, writer, and presenter on the challenges and opportunities for IT service management professionals.
Previously held positions in IT research and analysis (at IT industry analyst firms Ovum and Forrester and the UK Post Office), IT service management consultancy, enterprise IT service desk and IT service management, IT asset management, innovation and creativity facilitation, project management, finance consultancy, internal audit, and product marketing for a SaaS IT service management technology vendor.
