Service Manager 2012 and Service Level Management – Part 2

In a series of three blog posts we will walk you through how Service Level Management can be defined in Service Manager 2012 SP1.

This is the second blog post and the first one can be found here.

In his blog post we will go over some of the pre-requisites that we need to configure to enable the needed attributes for Service Level Management scenario.

Scenario:

We want to enable a SLA for all incidents what is assigned to a VIP Queue. Incidents is allocated to a VIP Queue when Priority is less or equal than 3 and subject contains VIP.

In order to enable this scenario we need to configure two things in Service Manager

• Incident Priority and calculation.
• Create a Queue for Incidents

Incident Priority

The first thing we want to specify is the Priority of an incident. We do this to distinguish incidents from each other by assigning a priority so the one with the lowest number should be the incidents that of most important to solve first.

An Incident Priority consists of two things: Urgency & Impact

Urgency: How critical in time is it to solve this disruption. The pay-roll system might be down, if this is in the beginning of the month in might not be that urgent, but if this is at the end of the month this could be a high urgency

Impact: How hard is the business impacted by this disruption. This factor deals with how hard the business is impacted. Is it only one person that cannot print or is it a hole building that cannot print?

Urgency + Impact = Priority. This will make sure that the incidents that has the most impact and the highest urgency gets handled first. This can be done by assigning priority a number (highest or lowest depending on defined standard). In many cases this is done by making a matrix similar to the one below.

Target Resolution Time

The target resolution time is a time that defines how quickly an incident within a given priority should be resolved.

Workflows can be configured to execute when a given target resolution is within a given expiration.

To configure Incident Priority Calculation and Target resolution time the following should be done:

In Service Manager this can be configured by doing the following:

1. Open Service Manager Console as Administrator
2. Select Administration in the Wunderbar
3. Under Administration > Select Settings
4. Under Settings > Select Incident Settings
5. In the menu on the left select Priority Calculation
6. Fill in the numbers according to your Incident defined standard (the one above can be used for inspiration)
8. Select Target Resolution Time
9. Specify Target Resolution Times for the priority 1-5 with given resolution times according to your Incident specification
10. This is an example of a configuration

Click Ok to save the configuration

To verify that the calculation works the following should be done:

1. Open Service Manager Console
2. Select Work items Wunderbar
3. Select Work Items > Incidents
4. Click Create Incidents in action menu
5. Fill in the following fields: Affected User, Title, Classification, Impact and Urgency
6. When filling in Urgency and Impact, make sure to verify that Priority gets a value according to the matrix configured earlier (Example is shown below)
7. Click ok to save the incident

Verify that the given target resolution time corresponds to the value given under Target Resolution Time (Example is given below)

Queues in Service Manager

A Queue in Service Manager can be described as this: A collection of Work Items (WIs) (e.g. Incident, Problem Change, Release, Service Requests) based on some criteria. E.g. a “High priority incidents” queue contains all incidents of high priority.

Queues can be used for the following

• Role-based security scoping (who as access to work with WI in this Queue)
• Report parameters (Used to limit criteria fro a Report)
• Notification subscription criteria (Used to Notification to execute for a given WI in a queue)
• SLA Specification

In this scenario we want to create a queue that has a criteria saying that if an Incident gets created with VIP in Title and has a Priority of 3 or lower it should be assigned to this queue.

To create a queue with these specification do the following:

1. Open the Service Manager Console as Administrator
2. Select Library in the Wunderbar
3. Select Queues in the Library view
4. In the Task menu select Create Queue
5. Click Next
6. Give the Queue a name and description e.g. VIP High Priority Incidents
7. In Work Item Type select Incident
8. Click Next
9. Select Priority under Available Properties and click Add
10. Select less or equal than in the drop down and write 3 in the window
11. Select Title under Available Properties and click Add
12. Write VIP in the blank field and click next (see example below)
13. Review Summary and click Create to finish the Queue creation

We have now completed the pre-requisites that allows us to configure the Service Level Management in Service Manager

Next time we will complete the configuration of Service Level Management for the Scenario given above.

Happy reading and testing.