Response Time and Resolution Time

[bobduncan76]

Hi,

According to ITIL, do Response Time and Resolution Time start together, or does Resolution Time start once the Response Time finishes?

Bob.

[Marcel]

The clock for both should start when IT learns about the incident, either due to a user call or because IT detected it. Look at it from the user perspective. Say you call the helpdesk, the incident then sits idle for a day waiting for the appropriate support group to accept the ticket and start working on the incident, which takes another day. What was the resolution time? 1 day or 2 days? I bet the user will say it took 2 days. He won't be interested in the fact that the actual work only took 1 day.

Marcel

[lmarinier]

I do agree with Marcel,
From a customer point of view, it took 2 days to solve the incident.

I think we have to keep in mind that incident management goal is to have the customer back to work asap.

Internal processes need to focus on it.

[Fabien]

The answer to your question actually sits in Availability Management, in the red book, point 8.9.9 The Expanded Incident Lifecycle.

The response time is the time between the detection and the diagnosis. ITIL defines "detection" as the point when the IT organization is made aware of the incident.

The Repair Time is the time between diagnosis and recovery. It represents the work that is done.

It is followed by the Recovery Time, which is the time lapse between recovery and restoration of the service.

The sum of all 3 gives you your Resolution Time from a user perspective.

But if you want to be realistic, you need to add the Detection time to the equation. Your true downtime is from Incident to Restoration, not from detection to restoration. You could validly argue that it is IT's responsibility to detect incidents the quickest way possible, and that ideally, tools should report incidents automatically. IT should not wait on a user to be affected before taking action.

my 3 cents (due to inflation)
_________________
BR,
Fabien Papleux

Accenture
Technology Consulting | Service Excellence
Red Badge Certified

Twitter @itilgeek