This post is part of the Process Optimization Use Case Series where we’ll focus on different techniques to identify process inefficiencies, non-conformant activities, and improvement opportunities. These posts will be broken into two sections – how to do the analysis and how to configure the Process Optimization project.
SLAs can be used across the organization in departments such as HR, Facilities, and IT. The intention of an SLA is to provide the customer with an expectation of service within a known timescale and the ability to monitor when service levels are not being met.
Obviously, when SLAs are missed or breached that has a negative impact on the customer or employee experience (and in some situations a financial impact based on penalties).
Most organizations have KPIs or metrics to help them understand their SLA performance. What percentage of tickets have breached, which category or type of tickets miss their SLAs most often, etc.
Where organizations tend to struggle is getting a better understanding of “why” these tickets are missing their SLAs.
Or if we are consistently meeting our SLAs where are our opportunities to adjust them to drive behaviors that will improve the experience for our customers.
Process Optimization can be used to help analyze tickets that have breached an SLA and help isolate inefficiencies in a given process.
You can find other Process Optimization use cases here
How to do the analysis
This approach can be applied to any workflow(Incident, HR Case, Customer Service Case, etc) and does not require any additional/special Process Optimization configuration beyond the out of the box content packs offered with a given workflow
Open your project to the Analyst Workbench view
From here we are going to use the “Conditions” option from the Advanced filters section in the lower left hand corner of the screen to isolate just the incidents that have breached a specific SLA.
Click on the Conditions button.
The Condition Builder allows us to filter the data driving the visualized process map just like we’d create a filter for a ServiceNow report. If we think about SLAs, the relevant information(data) doesn’t live in the Incident table, it lives in the Task SLA table that is linked to the Incident table. Good news, the Condition Builder allows us to create “Related List Conditions” so we can filter the map on SLA data.
Click on the arrow to the right of the Related List Condition text to expand the menu.
Use the Select drop down to locate and select the Task SLA table.
Then Set the criteria to “Greater than or equal to” and the value to “1”.
What this is saying is, query the Task SLA related list for those incidents on the visualized process map and only show me incidents where it has at least one record that meets the following criteria.
The criteria we want to use for this SLA Breach Analysis use case is SLA Tasks where their “Has Breached” value is true.
This will allow us to isolate the visualized process map to just incidents that have one or more SLAs that have breached.
An incident (or other type of task) can have more than one SLA associated to it. So let’s say we just want to focus on incidents that have breached a specific SLA. Maybe we want to focus on Response SLA breaches or Resolution SLA breaches, etc. We can simply add an additional condition. I created a specific SLA Definition for this post called “PO SLA Demo”
Once we hit Apply this will filter the map down to show us just the incidents that have breached that specific SLA.
In this example I only have 5 incidents that breached that PO Demo SLA, but I’m sure you will have more and you can start using the map, the breakdowns, bottleneck, variation, root cause and cluster analysis to start digging into potential causes.
Being able to compare some of the statistics about breached incidents with the entire set of incidents mined is sometimes also a useful exercise.
Here is one easy way to do that.
Click on the Save option in the Filters panel on the left hand side of the screen.
Then choose the New filter set option.
Give your new filter set a name.
Once we have the Filter Set saved, lets clear the filter set to bring back the full data set so we can do a side by side comparison and get a feel for the impact of breached incidents or look for improvement opportunities.
Use the Clear all option in the Filters panel on the left hand side of the screen.
Click on the Compare button in the upper right hand side of the screen to open the comparison panel.
Expand the Show Filters option in the right hand panel and select your Saved Filter Set to isolate your incidents that have breached.
Now that we have the side by side view we can start getting a better understanding of how different aspects of our incidents may be influencing breaches by using Breakdowns.
Or we can use the Comparison Statistics option to get some high level stats about our breached incidents in relation to the overall data set.
To do this click on the Model Options icon from the right hand panel.
Then click on the Comparison Statistics button.
My demo data doesn’t tell the same story that you’ll probably see in real life. You would expect to see your breached incidents with higher durations and likely a very high count of different routes.
The purpose of this post was to give you an understanding of one way to approach doing some SLA Breach Analysis. As with all analysis there will be multiple ways to look at the data.
How to configure the Process Optimization Project
This analysis should not require any special Process Optimization configuration. The out of the box project for each of the workflows will enable you to do this type of analysis.
By choosing to apply the related list condition within the Analyst Workbench we gave ourselves the option of doing the side by side comparison. If you wanted you can apply the same related list condition filters at the project level and go straight into analyzing your breached records, you would just lose the option of comparing those records to the whole data set.
If you are looking for more in-depth training you can use the Process Optimization Academy library of content
You can find other Process Optimization use cases here
Additional Resources
Process Optimization Essentials - Now Learning Course
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