What SLAs are you using for Incident Management?

[anthonywillis]

Out of the box, ServiceNow comes with the following predefined SLAs.

Priority 1 - Critical = 8 hour resolution

Priority 2 - High = 24 work hour resolution

Priority 3 - Moderate = 3 business days resolution

Priority 4 - Low = 5 business days resolution

I'm curious to see if others have kept the predefined SLAs, or have modified them?   If you have modified the SLAs for Incident within your organization, would you please post them?   I'm looking to do some bench marking to compare how other organizations utilizing ServiceNow have set them up.

[Uncle Rob]

Humble suggestion - don't worry about other SN customers on the specifics of their SLA timelines.   Far better place to start is with the consumers of the services provided by your infrastructure.   In my experience the SLA discussion is too often "the cart being set before the horse".   Meaning people are usually interested in deploying it before they've adequately defined Services, established even a basic CMDB, or considered existing performance.

An SLA comes at the intersection of what a customer will tolerate for a given service, and what all the teams delivering that Service can possibly provide.   I suspect there are systems in your environment that will result in death, compliance failure, and tremendous economic damage if they were down for 8 hours.   So why even *consider* another customer where an 8 hour restoration window is acceptable?

[Uncle Rob]

Here's a few of the ideals I strive for, and encourage my customers to strive for:

- Identify the services that are critical to your business operation (in your case, the business of Health Care, not the business of IT)

- Create at least a basic CMDB with Services integrated into the data model

- Class the different business services by their business criticality.

- Predicate the SLA definitions on the given Service's criticality (most critical apps should have either a higher priority OR a lower timeline for a given priority).

- Make sure that you're not making empty promises.   Use whatever data you can to determine how teams actually perform.

[anthonywillis]

I appreciate the feedback Robert.   Thank you.

[Uncle Rob]

Any time.   Measuring success / failure is probably my favorite part of working on the ServiceNow platform.

I'm available any time to talk SLA's, Metrics, and especially Performance Analytics.

Hit me with a follow and I can give you my contact info.