Understanding my SLAs Part II - The Difference between Actual and Business elapsed times

[iris_geist]

Imagine, you just got off the phone with your manager, telling you that all your SLAs that ran over the weekend have breached, and you have some explaining to do. I would think this would have you shaking in your boots. So you look into your SLAs and SLA definitions and wonder — that just can't be?

In Understanding my SLAs Part I, I shared where your missing time in a SLA workflow was going, today I am going to show you the difference between what your manager sees as breached, and what you know to be true. Don't start shaking in your boots just yet. There is a difference between the Action elapsed time and the Business elapsed time that may be confusing.

Actual vs. Business elapsed time

The Actual Elapsed Time is the time between start time and now, minus the pause duration. The Business Elapsed Time is the time within the specified schedule between start time and now, minus the pause duration.

Out of the box, our system will always show the actual times and percentages in the list, not the business times and percentages. This is fine, if you work on a 24x7 calendar, but if you are working with 8-5 weekdays, the numbers can be quite different.

Let us take a look at what the business numbers would be on our example ticket.

It was opened on Friday, December 12^th at 20:49. Note that this is outside of our SLA calendar that goes from 8am to 5 pm every weekday. Today is the following Monday at 9:44 (am). Our elapsed business time would be just 1 hour and 44 minutes, because our clock is stopped after 5 pm on Fridays and does not get restarted until 8 am on Mondays. Instead of an actual elapsed percentage of >600%, it really is a business elapsed percentage of 18%, on our 8-hour SLA.

Since we don't work weekends, it is quite a difference between actual time elapsed and business time elapsed. We go from "Oh no, we breached" to "Hey, no problem, we still got enough time to figure this out".

Tip to keep your manager happy when reviewing your SLAs:

I always recommend to my customers whose SLAs' are not on a 24x7 schedule to change the time based fields.

• add the business time and percentage to their list
• remove the actual numbers.

These values can cause confusion and provide an incorrect breach analysis on incident records. This will prevent the panicked or unfriendly calls from the manager demanding an explanation on why everything keeps breaching over the weekends…

Talking about weekends — I am sure you have heard that even SLAs take breaks? Sometimes these breaks can be quite confusing. What happens to pause times that are outside of my work hours? What if they are half in, half out? Should I care? We will discuss all of that in the third and last part of this series on SLAs.

For part 3, see Understanding my SLAs Part III — Pause Times