Stop The Clock

[mitter]

Good Afternoon,

I am wondering if anyone can provide some advice on what to do in the following scenarios..

Loaner Laptop requested.. Service Desk completes the work and provies the laptop.. The client could have the laptop in his/her posession for anywhere to 1hr to months at a time. Of Course, you cannot have any one SLA to cover this circumstance as the time is negotiated..

Would you

1) Stop the clock while the Laptop is in the users posession? and restart it once the latop has returned to caculate the time that the Service Desk takes to complete the remaining activities in the process
or...
2) Use a Priority level to state that the SLA is negotiated with the client?

Any advice is appreciated
Mitter

[swansong]

Your SLA measures performance of a service against agreed targets. What targets are you attempting to measure?

In your example, does your SLA measure the response of the ICT service desk to restore a service (by supplying the laptop), or does your SLA measure a permanent fix to the problem (indicated by the return of the laptop?)

[Diarmid]

What [expletive deleted] clock?

Okay I guess you are working with generic processes (presumably a service request process, but perhaps an incident process if you are ultimately generic). Well you quickly get into crazy conundrums when you work at that level.

For me, this calls for a laptop loan process that explicitly defines all aspects. That way you don't have a clock to stop because your process won't have started a clock to measure something irrelevant. On the other hand you might well have a clock ticking against the loan so that you can chase up from time to time to confirm the machine is still required and not just acting as a door stop.

Alternative response

The service is delivered when the laptop is delivered. The management of the laptop from then until return is a different process from service delivery.
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[noneforit]

It depends what type of call you would log for a 'loaner laptop'

It wouldn'd be an incident in my opinion

I am not even sure if would be service request, unless you advertise a service to loan out laptops

When you say 'stop the clock' im assuming you mean putting the call on hold. Its very much a grey area and ITIL is a framework so you can adapt it to your needs.