I am going to repost this dilemma I have been mowing over for a couple of days in the hopes that someone can offer me a THUMBS UP (it will probably work) or ...... Good Luck on that one!!!
Business Requirement (meant to address sla's for level one production support which spans three hourly shifts, one person per shift). If someone's shift ends while owning an open ticket of high to critical priority, it is not feasible for the remaining shifts to have everyone's tickets assigned to the last shift person. We would like the sla clock to pause and resume the following scheduled workday for that assigned to itil user.
Additionally, the other shortcoming our environment has is that we are missing the timezone field being populated on the user record. That would have to come from our HR system and that option is not available to me at this time.
Approach 1:
With Istanbul, you have the ability to specify the schedule source field. My idea was to set this field to the assigned to schedule. This would provide the ability to support different shifts across all ITIL users by adding users to a shift however this is painful since it would be a 1:1 ratio between users and schedules.
EVERY ITIL user would need their own specific schedule which is unfortunate but not sure how else to address this requirement.
I have been told by support:
"The only way a user can impact when an SLA will run is with the 'Timezone source' field. If a schedule runs from 8AM - 5PM, the timezone in which these times are running is determined by the selection in this field."
However, I think this functionality is not well spelled out in the documentation and not widely used either. I am going to attempt this approach even in spite of it's shortcomings.
Approach 2 (not doable in this release):
Better alternative would be to create different groups for each shift and use the Assignment Group Schedule . However, this is not possible because there is no 'Schedule' field available for selection against assignment group (as is available for the Assigned to field). Unfortunate
Hey Christine,
for approach 1:
I agree with the solution suggested by Aswin, define 3 separate SLAs, one for each of the three shifts, and based on the time the incident is assigned, the appropriate shifts' SLA would attach. This way you wouldn't need to manage the shift of each ITIL user.
Definitely this increases the number of SLAs configured (no. of shifts x no. of priorities), but given that the number of shifts is 3, and is not likely to be a dynamic value, this would be a decent tradeoff.
for approach 2:
If segregating the ITIL userbase into 3 separate groups based on shifts is feasible, then we can implement your desired solution by 'manually creating' the schedule field on the group form.
The schedule field is simply a reference field referencing to 'cmn_schedule' table.
Once saved, the field reflects in the selection dropdown:
Only consideration with this approach is that the user's group membership would need to be kept in sync with his/her changing shifts.
Hope this helps!
