[Tips & Tricks] Operational level agreement(OLA)

Ever wondered about how to manage the agreement on delivery of services between each internal support groups of an organization?

In service desk plus, post the build 11107, we have introduced the feature "Operational Level Agreements" "OLA" which provides the internal measurable metrics among the support groups that will work in tandem with the SLA of the respective services promised by the service provider to the customer.

Why do we need OLA?
The OLA's are generally configured to align the activities or involvement of various support groups in order to deliver the service to the end user within the intended SLA of the service provider. This is because, the internal teams involved in delivering the service, might not necessarily be aware of the actual promised time of delivery by the service provider.

Hence OLA's are used in order to simplify the workforce calculation among the groups that are involved, which helps us to track the internal service commitments and still deliver the service within the promised time frame to the Customers.

How to set up OLA in ServiceDeskPlus?
In service desk plus, OLA is provided as a part of SLA Under Admin - Incident Management/Service Catalog - Service Level Agreements.

For any given SLA, the OLA shall be configured by selecting the amount of time that you shall expect the particular group to be involved in working on that ticket.

One can also configure multiple groups and their respective OLA's time for a given SLA.

How does it work?

The moment the ticket is assigned to an internal group the OLA calculation would begin, and just like SLA's, the OLA's due by time for that support group keeps changing from the time it is assigned, in sync with the total amount of stop timer ( say like on-hold, pending ) involved in the ticket.

This way even if you shall toggle the ticket between various support groups, the service desk plus has the intelligence to calculate the due by time of that particular group alone, based on the amount of time it has spent on that group previously or the previous group.