[% META title = "Defining Service Expectations and Measurements" %]
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal definition for a service contract. The most important target is the Turn-Around-Time — the time to complete a request.
We measure a service level is a percentage of requests that are resolved within a given time. However, in order to balance work priorities, we can assign a severity to a tickets based upon business needs, and assign a different SLA target for each severity. For example, we may chose three (relatively simple) severities:
I will chose a critical issue as:
When a request (ticket) is submitted to the system an immediate Auto Response is generated so the requestor knows their issue has been logged, however this gives no assurance to the requestor that their issue has been reviewed by a human and scheduled for action. Luckily, we can do this automatically when we assign (take) and priorities (set the custom field of severity) the ticket. If we want we could also put a time estimate in at this stage...
To determine our ability to adequately perform our work, we can define our SLA, per severity as outlined above, as a time to:
Severity | Target time to respond | Target time to resolve |
---|---|---|
Critical | 1 hour | 1 day |
Normal | 1 hour | 7 day |
Minor | 1 hour | None |
We set the target time to resolve as the same for all Severities as we won't know the Severity or the resolution time until we have reviewed the ticket initally. So we should immediately classify, and (auto) respond to the requestor at that time.
Not everything is deserving of 24x7 cover. No one cares if the office copier stops working at 3am; but you do care at 9am until 6pm. Alternatively you would be concernced about your e-Commerce application going down at any time.
If we have offices in multiple time zones (eg: London, New York) then there may be some services that are in use during your Global Business Hours, and some during your Local Business Hours. To deal with this we'll chose three classes (levels) of services to indicate an importance, and we select what services belong to which classification:
For each of these Class of service we have our three (or more) severities, so we can now define our target response and resolution times, and our target SLA percentage to meet this.
Class | Severity | Response time | Response SLA | Resolve time | Resolve SLA |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Gold 24 x 7 | Critical | 1 hour | 90% | 2 hours | 90% |
Normal | 1 hour | 90% | 1 day | 90% | |
Minor | 1 hour | 90% | None | - | |
Silver Global business hours | Critical | 1 hour | 90% | 24 global business hours | 90% |
Normal | 1 hour | 90% | 96 global business hours | 90% | |
Minor | 1 hour | 90% | None | - | |
Bronze Local business hours | Critical | 1 hour | 90% | 24 local business hours | 90% |
Normal | 1 hour | 90% | 96 local business hours | 90% | |
Minor | 1 hour | 90% | None | - |
The default ticket has all these fields, but we need to extend with a custom field for Severity and Service. This will be a Custom Field.