Are there any best practices for Workshifts and Service Types?

Products

• SUPPORT AUTOMATION- SERVER
• CA Service Desk Manager - Unified Self Service
• KNOWLEDGE TOOLS
• CA Service Management - Asset Portfolio Management
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

Introduction:

What is the best practice to handle the Workshifts to stop and start SLAs when configured for Contacts/Groups and Service Type/Events?

 

Background:

Usually problems with expiring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in CA Service Desk Manager come up because the Workshift was not taken into consideration.

The purpose of this document is to explain how Workshifts are considered when working with Service Types.

 

 

 

Environment

Release: 14.1, 17.x
Component: USRD

Resolution

Instructions:

1. The first thing to note is that a Groups workshift is NOT taken into account when calculating SLA violations.

The workshift and Timezone of the Service Type associated with a ticket are used to calculate the SLA violation. So the ticket should have the appropriate Service Type assigned to it and the Service Type will have a workshift and Timezone assigned and these will be taken into account when the SLA is being calculated. Note also that the events associated withe the Service Type can also have Workshift and Timezones applied to them and these take precedence over the Service Types workshift and Timezone. 
The way forward would be to create workshift with the group's working hours and then assign that to a Service Type that gets assigned for the tickets that the group will address.

2. Check is if a holiday was correctly entered in the workshift definition.

For example, consider you have a workshift defined for Business hours, you should add a holiday as follows:
Mon - Fri { 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM }
07/04/2014

3. Check if you have "sla_workshift_override" installed.

Go to Administration | Options Manager | Request-Change-Issue | sla_workshift_override.
Verify if the status = Installed.

This option is used to define as default the workshift set in the Service Type EVENTS, that is, no matter if you have workshifts assigned to Groups or to the Analysts, if the Service Type in use has Events with workshifts assigned, then is this workshift that will be considered by the SLA calculation.

Keep in mind these are the rules that apply to Workshifts x Service Types:

• If you set a workshift to a Service Type, you will need to recycle the Service so the workshift is recognized.
• If you have a workshift defined for a Service Type, but not for an Event, the workshift defined for the Service Type is the one to be considered.
• If you have a workshift defined for an Event, but not for a Service Type, the workshift defined for the Event is the one to be considered.
• If you have a workshift defined for an Event AND for a Service Type, the one defined for the Event is the one to be considered.

So make sure your use case fits this scenario: your workshift is correctly set, sla_workshift_override = installed and you have a workshift defined for your events on a Service Type.

If there are any issues, before fixing the Workshift, review other Service Types configuration to check if such Events (and Workshifts) are in use. You might be fixing one problem and causing other.

Consider the best option according to your Service Desk implementation.