SLA on case and incident

[Hans Peter]

Hi,

I have a question regarding SLAs, and working on cases and incidents. We want to use CSM with ITSM, but are not sure how to handle SLAs when an incident gets created from a case. 

Let's say we have a resolution SLA of 4 hours. This is attached to the case, since this is the customer's entrypoint. Now, the customer opens a case, and the time measurement for the SLA starts. The agent tries to solve the case on their own for 30 minutes, but then decides that this must be a technical issue, and creates an incident which he assigns to one of the technical support teams. 

Since the SLA is attached to the case, the assignee of the incident has no clue they have to complete the incident in less than 3,5 hours, or else the SLA on the case will breach. I suppose they could look up the case record and the corresponding SLA, but that seems very tedious, and also all workflows and warnings related to reaching a certain SLA duration threshold are only attached to the case, and the assignee of the case.

What would be the best practice of working with SLAs on different records?

Thanks,

Hans

[Prasad Pagar]

Hi Hans,

Didn't tried this personally but why cant you just pause the case SLA and then start SLA on Incident with specific time taking from case.

What I mean is you can create SLA Duration type of your choice and then use that for incident SLA's.

Custom SLA Duration type can consider related case.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/quebec-it-service-management/page/product/service-level-management/concept/c_SLADuration.html?cshalt=yes

There might be other things but this is what came to my mind after reading your question 🙂

Thank you
Prasad

[Tomas Lozano]

Hallo Hans

Here's some thoughts.

In terms of the SLA, the Incident doesn't have to know about the Case and the same the other way around.

To put it bluntly, the question here is why should it matter to an incident team (remember that this could also be a supplier) that the case has got x minutes left - they only just received it and still need to go through their process. 

Having said that, if there is consensus with the incident team/org that the Incident's SLA needs adjusted/shortened to match that of the Case, a new 'Relative duration' could be created and referenced in the incident SLA definition as Prasad wrote above.

I would advise to have someone keep a close eye on this and adapt the solution based on the usage, and deal with any unwanted problems that arise so the incident resolution team is not disadvantaged e.g. passing of the hot potato - a case is 30mins away from breaching and an incident is logged etc.

I hope you find a good solution for all parties involved!

Cheers,
Tomas

[Hans Peter]

Hey Thomas,

Sorry for coming back to you so late, and thanks for the reply.

>  why should it matter to an incident team?

Maybe I'm not really understanding the workflow, but to me, it would matter that we don't breach the case SLA, because that will piss of the customer (and will possibly result in repercussions), but resolving the case is dependent on fixing the incident, so without knowing the SLA present on the case - and therefore, basically the deadline -  how could the incident team assign resources adequately?  

I'd imagine people breaching SLAs left and right if they're not visible on the incident, but if you have real-world experience with this, please, tell me more.