SLA breaches

[Black_bear]

Question:

A resolver team realises that it needs 2 more days to fix a call. This means that the call will breach its SLA. A member of the team phones the customer and the customer agrees that the resolver team has two more days to fix the call.

Should the resolver team suspend the call to stop the clock - which means that the call will still appear as being within SLA?

[MBU]

I'm not a "pure ITIL evangelist" but more often pragmatic, so here my 2c:

I would count this as a breach, because

You did not solve it

these kind of breaches gives you often an important input for a SIP
_________________
Michael B.

"I can't say it'll be better if it changes, but I can say it has to change to be good"
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799)

[UKVIKING]

Black_bear, MBU

Having a SLA against Call to FIx is stupid in my opinion

Responding to incidents and working on them are two different things

If a CTF falls outside the SLA, it falls outside the SLA.

The service provider - when this gets fixed - should review why the work took longer than the SLA

The service consumer - at the next periodic meeting - should bring this up and find out why

-----

A call to fix SLA means that you will have the service back in X time - regardless of what the underlying cause is. stupid to the Nth degree

example:

CTF SLA between company and customer. company depends on 3rd party h/w vendor.
the maintenance contract for the 3rd party vendor is 12 hr respond to call
the CTF SLA is 24 hours -

If the h/w is at fault and the 3rd party vendor does not have the part or the staff available to FIX the fault.. the company is screwed

this is because of a maintenance contract set at one level and the SLA set at another and there is no wiggle room
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Diarmid]

[Black_bear]

In our organisation, each incidents is assigned a severity and impact. The combination of these defines the priority and the target fix time. Why is this stupid? Lots of orgnisations have this approach.

[Diarmid]

The ability to fix an incident is governed by the amount and skills of resources applied, the nature of the incident and the actions required to fix it.

You can apply more resources and greater skills according to your priority system but you cannot redefine what is wrong or what needs to be done by tweaking priorities.
_________________
"Method goes far to prevent trouble in business: for it makes the task easy, hinders confusion, saves abundance of time, and instructs those that have business depending, both what to do and what to hope."
William Penn 1644-1718

[Black_bear]

Is the general view that the estimated fix time for each incident should be decided on its merits each time and agreed with the sufferer rather than have a standard formula?

UKViking - the example you have quoted should be covered by alignment of underpinning contracts - in an ideal world

[UKVIKING]

Black Bear

1 - There is no general view on anything
2 - There is no ideal world
3 - there is only reality

One of the compounding issues is the law of unintended consequences

For example

Having the maintenance contracts changed from a quick response time and fix time to an average level contract with out changing the SLA for the customers

Major outage happens and.....

The ideal world sceanrio also assumes that th minion who do the SLA and contracts and UC and OLAs are talking to each other or even think about talkng to each other
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Mark-OLoughlin]

Hi,

the real issue is that what has become standard is for organisations to lock into an agreed "SLA" - by which they really mean SLT or Service Level Targets. In this case SLT's for Incident and perhaps service request completion.

this is not ideal for reasone provided in this thread but until organisations understand this - not much will change. It provides an organisation with what the see as a reasonable guarantee that things will get fixed by a certain time - after which penalties etc may be applied.

In this case - should the clock stop - well if depends on what you detailed (if you did) regardig stopping the clock. If the service provider and the organisation agreed to stopping the clock - then do it.
_________________
Mark O'Loughlin
ITSM / ITIL Consultant

[SwissTony]

Warning: off-topic

[UKVIKING]

I'm late
I'm late
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[Diarmid]