Calculating SLA: Incident Management

Calculating the SLA adherence percentage for incidents seems to be a very simple task. But organizations struggle when they have to report on the same. One has to consider the open tickets, closed/resolved tickets and tickets that have breached the SLA.

Organizations have adopted different ways to calculate the SLA.

APPROACH I:

In Some organizations SLA is calculated based on the tickets they have resolved for the period. For example they have 10 tickets they have resolved of which 1 has breached the SLA, for them the SLA adherence would be 90%, i.e. they use the formula:
What they miss out here is that as a customer one would expect the breach to be reported in the report when the breach has actually happened and not when the breached ticket has been resolved. In this case SLA reporting gives all green whereas the reality is something different. This would also mean that in case one does not resolve the ticket that has breached the SLA, the SLA report will never reflect the same.


APPROACH II:
Another approach that organization takes is that they calculate SLA adherence based on the tickets resolved within the SLA and number of tickets created for that period. They use the formula:
In this approach although the SLA breaches are factored, yet the real picture is not presented as there would be tickets within the SLA that have not been resolved.


APPROACH III:
In yet another approach organization's calculate SLA adherence based on the tickets resolved within the SLA and number of tickets resolved for that period. They use the formula
In this approach although the SLA breaches are factored, yet again the real picture is not presented as there would be tickets that has breached the SLA and has yet not been resolved. Such tickets are not factored in the denominator.

Approach II and III will show a negative picture of the delivery as in both cases denominator tends to have a higher value.

There are other approaches similar to the ones discussed above used by organizations.

RECOMMENDED APPROACH:
When calculating SLA adherence, one has to factor the number of open tickets for a period, number of tickets that has breached the SLA and number of tickets carried forward from the previous reporting cycle. Considering these factors, I recommend the following formula:


In case one as to calculate SLA adherence for a particular period, start and end dates for the required period can be used instead of that for the week.

Strategic Management & ITIL

Previous posts have helped us in understanding Strategic Management.

We know that Strategic Management helps in shaping or defining the organizational strategy. Today business is dependent on IT. So the actual translation of organizational strategy into business benefits for any organization will happen only when its IT is able to support the same. This is where Service Strategy phase of ITIL V3 becomes important. Thus, there is a very strong link between Strategic Management and ITIL.

Strategic Thinking

Strategic thinking means asking, "Are we doing the right thing?" It requires three things:

• Purpose or end--a strategic thinker is trying to do something.
• Understanding the environment, particularly of the opponent, or opposing forces, affecting and/or blocking achievement of these ends.
• Creativity in developing effective responses to the opponent or opposing forces.