Has anyone implemented any kind of SLA/OLA for Problem Management

[cmacfadyen]

Has anyone implemented any kind of SLA/OLA for Problem Management.   If you have what have you done?   If not, have you thought about and decided against it, if so what was the reason against?   or for that matter the reason for doing it?

[knoreikis]

Cornelia,

Here is something to consider when thinking about implementing SLAs/OLAs. From years of working and running the problem management discipline, I can tell you that success of finding a root cause many times depend on how soon the technicians start looking for it. So adding a 3 day OLA for the initial investigation/findings may sound undesirable, but can be very effective. Once the incident is restored, support moves on to the next fire and on many occasions, in a week or so they don't even remember what happened, or logs have rolled over or, no longer have accurate facts of the incident. With adding an OLA to any problems that initiate from major incidents will not only bring results, but also it's a sign of your process maturity.

[ianm_clayton]

Kristina - good advice - but as an IT Manager of old, my concern was to limit the investment of resources in an investigation of a cause (costs $) and we injected a preliminary stage learned from healthcare - 'control barrier analysis (CBA)'.   This is a stage of cause analysis often missing from most setups.   It had a defined set of procedures and limits on what to look at and how much to invest.   A control barrier being a policy or procedure that should be followed.   An example of control barriers in real life are set-belts in cars and STOP signs!

So 3 days might work for some - but does that work for all situations?   Problem management MUST define the problem and its impact properly (missing from ITIL) and then wait for management to authorize the next stage - initial cause analysis and CBA.

In these discussions we should disconnect incident from problem.   Incident can continue on its merry way while problem is crafting a statement as part of evidence gathering.

Can we discuss major incidents a bit later - as this implies the incident response team can also define impact the same way problem team does.   By the way - do any of you have experience of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) protocols.   Much of what I might say going forward is sourced from there - not ITIL - they (FEMA) have so much more experience in all this.   I've a course introducing the history of incident management at my online Service Management University here :

http://servicemanagement.university/courses/100-service-incident-management/

Funnily enough - the Problem Management courses are scheduled to go up by first week of March!

[rajesh kumar9]

relation between sla and ola