SLAs on Incident Tasks

[Janelle3]

We want to encourage the use of incident tasks for complex high priority incidents where the work of multiple teams is required in parallel / in collaboration. However incident tasks do not seem to have SLAs attached. The Incident Task form shows a Priority but there is no tab for Task SLAs or even the SLAs of the Parent incident. The issue is the team assigned the Incident Task does not get to see the elapsed percentage time, breached etc and so does not get a sense of the urgency and remaining time before SLA breach. Is there a way to show SLAs on the Incident Task itself? Preferably with minimal customisation.

Thank you!

[Alex Rathwyn]

Hi Janelle,

I am also not an Admin/Developer, but I can tell you this is possible since we have implemented something similar (except we are not using Incident Tasks, we're using Catalog Tasks, but I'm looking to change that which is how I came across your post). It did require separate SLAs and custom fields and business rules. Based on what we did but with an eye towards implementing against all Incident Tasks, you would need:

• A custom date/time field on the Incident Task table and a business rule that will populate the field with the Opened timestamp of the INC when the Incident Task is created
• An SLA definition for Incident Tasks created for each possible Priority with the same (or shorter) allowed duration as the corresponding Incident ones
• Enable retroactive start and retroactive pause on the Incident Task SLAs and for the 'Set Start To' field choose the custom date/time field with the INC's Opened timestamp

This results in the Incident Task SLA inheriting the elapsed duration of the Incident. However, as you called out, if they pause the Incident Task then the due date on the SLA will be pushed out and no longer be in line with the Incident. Incident Tasks don't inherit On Hold values from the parent Incident, so that disconnect would be true in the other direction as well.

Due to the above, I've been considering setting the allowed duration for Incident Tasks to be less than the allowed duration of the Incident, like an OLA, but so far can't find any best practice recommendations on that.

[Janelle3]

Thank you Alex for your in depth response! It does seem to quickly get quite customised/complex to go down this path, and we can still end up with the SLAs on parent/child potentially getting out of sync.

I wonder if rather than implementing Incident Task SLAs, there is a way to instead give visibility of the Parent Incident SLA from the Incident Task form? It is a shared resolution target after all, and we want all teams working towards the resolution to have that shared visibility and sense of urgency. 

[Alex Rathwyn]

Hi Janelle,

It's been a while, but I have a couple other thoughts for you:

1. To create Incident Task SLAs that inherit the elapsed time of the originating Incident, you might not need the custom date/time field on the Incident Task table, since the Incident that generated it is populated in a field already existing on the Incident Task - so in theory you should be able to dotwalk to the main Incident's Opened timestamp in the SLA Definition instead of creating a new field. This is not the case with Catalog Tasks, which is what we were using in my environment, so I didn't think of it.
2. To expose the Incident's SLAs on the Incident Task... I would think this should be possible? There is an OOB Related List for Task SLA->Task which automatically shows all SLAs associated with the ticket currently being viewed. I know you can Define New Relationships in ServiceNow, so there has to be a way to create a Task SLA->Incident relationship that would show SLAs in the related list that are associated with the Incident populated in the Incident field of the Incident Task. In fact, this is such a great idea I'm probably going to see if we can do that here, now that we switched over to using Incident Tasks for this work instead of Catalog Tasks.

[Janelle3]

Thanks Alex, sounds like you have given this a lot of thought! I would love to know how you go with this idea. It's more in line with what I was hoping was possible, exposing the Incident SLA on the Incident Task rather than creating a separate SLA for the incident task. If we go down this path even if it starts out inheriting values from the parent it could end up out of sync. Thanks again!

[Samantha Sam]

Hi @Alex Rathwyn , @Janelle Can you pls share finally how you did for this scenario.