Incident restoration of service target times

[BNZ_Incidents]

Hi, our organisation currently maintains target times for restoration of service that I feel are not quite in touch with industry. Our high severity incidents are ok, it's just at the lower end of the scale (what we term Sev 3 and Sev 4) that the issue exists.

As an example, our Sev 4 records are intended to have a restoration of service of 4 weeks (20 days). Most of them tend to be fixed within 5 days and it is very rare to see an incident not be restored within 10 days. This is the target time I would like to see in place.

What is everyones feeling on this, is there a recommended industry best practice? Can anyone point me in the right direction on what restoration target times I should be looking at?

Cheers
Ants

[Diarmid]

Ants,

this is all about service, improvement, SLA and costs.

At one end of the spectrum, if your customer wants 20 day turnaround and you are doing 5 with variation up to 10, then you are putting more resource into this than is required. You could look at what other work your staff could be doing at a higher priority.

Or, you could offer your customer a sharper response window at little risk to yourselves. but two points: a) it would be difficult to increase your charge for the better guarantee because they can already see that you are delivering in practice; b) you should examine for cause the odd times when you take much longer and, if necessary recategorize their severity level or draw up exception clauses (that is if you cannot see a way to speed them up).

It is easier to work on genuine improvement initiatives if you have a realistic SLA because there are better incentives. So once you have tightened up the agreement you will be able to look for other ways of improving your incident turn around.
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[BNZ_Incidents]

Thanks for that response Diarmid, it's certainly provided some food for thought.

Cheers
Ants