The main corporate tool for controlling the fulfillment of time standards is Service Level Management, or SLM (service level management). In modern enterprise-platforms, SLM is an organic part of the system: it is the basis for prescribing regulations, controlling the quality of services provided, and determining violations of deadlines. SLM regulates the level of service and controls the compliance of services with customer expectations.
This is a large area of ITSM, one of its mandatory processes. By and large, from the point of view of software implementation SLM comes down to accounting of time standards and setting up their calculation for different types of requests that the company wants to control. For example, service requests and incidents.
ITSM SimpleOne allows you to set norms for any objects that can be classified as tasks. That is, all objects of type “task” inherited from the task head table can be set up with time standards for execution. This functionality first defines time limits for processing anything, and then monitors compliance with those limits.
The success of SLM depends largely on the information provided on the basis of which targets are generated. A priority source of such information is the service catalog. Quality indicators are usually fixed in the agreement to this or that service. As a rule, there are three types of such agreements:
- SLA (Service Level Agreement);
- OLA (Operational Level Agreement);
- UC (Underpinning Contract).
What should SLM be able to do in ITSM systems?
Customization of indicators is as flexible as possible and available to any user
The SLM section of any quality ITSM system has indicator customization features, it’s standard. However, we are proud of how easy to use we have made these settings. On the SimpleOne platform, we have brought them to such a level of simplicity that the configuration of very complex logic of calculating quality indicators can be done without scripts: all (even the most sophisticated) settings, customization, introduction of additional parameters are done visually using No Code tools.
Indicators (time calculation rules) rely on calendars
In SLM it is possible to create a working time calendar (production calendar). So indicators will calculate working time based on these calendars.
All indicators can operate in different time zones
This is critical for large geo-distributed companies. Thus it becomes possible to count time by the location of both the consumer and the task performer. For example, the requesting subscriber is located in Vladivostok, but the task is executed in the Moscow time zone. In ITSM-system SimpleOne there is a possibility to customize the calculation so that the working hours are counted according to Vladivostok time, and so that the calculation is based on Moscow time. In addition, it is possible to calculate the time within the base time zone, which is defined directly in the indicator. It is also possible to correlate the schedule of working and non-working hours with the time zone of the location of the configuration unit.
Umbrella SLA: subordinate agreements
This feature shows itself when the provision of one service relies on the provision of other, related services. That is, the fulfillment of the task as a whole includes subtasks that may be, for example, in the contractor’s scope of duties. Thus, more than one person and even, perhaps, more than one company is responsible for the fulfillment. Thus one SLA overlaps with another, and they may not coincide in terms of deadlines. Then the one who received the initial request, escalating a part of this request further down the chain, is guaranteed to get a delay in fulfillment according to his SLA. To avoid such collisions, SimpleOne’s SLA (SLA, OLA, UC) accounting system allows you to specify subordinate (additional, related) agreements with the contractor at the informative level, in the help. It is also possible to link agreements to the corresponding contracts.
Retrospective Start Time Counters
Typically, if a request/incident should change its counter (most often due to a status change), the logic of the agreement is to set the start time of the new counter to be the same as the previous counter. Let’s take an incident that has several rules for calculating time based on the priority assigned to it. If the incident’s priority changes, the counter should change as well, either decreasing the time to process the incident or increasing it, but the counter start time should not change.
Percentage recalculation of time counters on retrospective start
This tool came into our SLM arsenal thanks to feedback from customers. They brought to our attention a problem that could arise without finalizing retrospective counter billing.
When the priority is changed from medium to very high, it can happen that when the counters are changed, the task is guaranteed to be overdue. For example, initially a task with a medium priority level was assigned four hours to solve. Two hours passed, it became clear that the task was more important, and it is assigned a higher priority and a new counter – not for four hours, but for two. This results in an automatic delay of the task solution. To prevent this from happening, SLM SimpleOne uses percentage recalculation. That is, with the new indication, the counter will start at the moment when the priority change took place, and the system will calculate the percentage of time left for resolution and apply this percentage to the end time of the new counter. There will be no overdue time, but the time left to process will be the same percentage of the total SLA processing time as the previous counter before the change.
Convenient, easily customizable and at the same time possessing the ability to implement complex logic of calculation of all kinds of quality indicators in the conditions of different calendars, time zones, related agreements with contractors and late changes in the classification of SLM – is a reliable foundation for continuous improvement of service level and increasing customer satisfaction of any services, not only IT, but also other service departments of a large organization.
