Incident Mgmt - How long to close an incident?

[kber]

Does anyone know what ITIL recommends (Or industry standard is) for a Target number for the avg time to resolve an incident? We are thinking of 1 day for a target. - we are currently at about 7 days.

Another question I have is: If a issue comes into the Service Desk and the customer states they cannot do their job because of this issue but as long as it is fixed by the end of the month it is OK with them. Assuming it is the beginnning of the month should ths initially be set as an Incident since they do not need service restored right away or is it a Service Request because it is known ahead of time that the issue needs resolved by month end?

We are thinking the avg days to close an incident a different number then the avg days to close a service request. Thanks for your help.

[Marcel]

Not all incidents are equal. If a business critical application is down then a 1 day resolution target is probably way too slow. For a single user losing some minor functionality, a few days might be fine. I suggest you first define a few priority levels based on impact (to the business) and urgency (again from a business standpoint). Don't do more than say 4 priority levels. For each priority level you then define a different resolution target.

Regarding the user who reports something broken but who is apparently not in a hurry to get it fixed: this is still an incident (an IT service can not be used as it should). If the user was asking to provide him with a service he does not have yet (e.g. access to an application) or to modify (or terminate) a service that he already uses (e.g. change his privileges within an application), then that would be a service request.