1

Does anyone use Serivce Level Agreements (SLAs) with their internal users? If so, how effective is it in managing requests?

6 Spice ups
2

If they send it to the helpdesk i have a SLA off

  • 2 hour response with priority and esitmate
  • High Priority - Feedback every 2 hours till fixed, fix for ASAP - Things like server down or something major
  • Med Priority - To be fixed in a week
  • Low - Fixed when ever - Big projects

I should add i have a 2 hour response becasuse its only me and allows me to go for lunch or pop out of the office for meetings that last a hour and then still meet the SLAs.

3

No SLA here. Now when I am consulting I try to make regular tickets a 24hr turn around and critical tickets around 1hr

4

Hey Maggie, we’re an MSP and have SLAs with most of our client base and find them really useful. We have also had to write them for larger clients with their own small internal IT departments for which we provide 2nd and 3rd level support and consulting.

SLAs have a number of functions in our view and server both the ones providing the SLA and the recipients of the SLA. They help set expectation and usually provide or describe mechanisms for metrics which are also useful to both parties.

Generally I think they’re a good thing, but have to be pretty carefully written so as to not set targets and expectations that are dificult or imposible to reach. They can also be used to set more realistic targets if the userbase and management have steadily raised their expectation to unechievable levels.

5

We try to get all things sorted on day that they were open.

If something requires 3rd party involvement - we try to keep it under 5 work days.

Response time - up to one hour.

High priorities - response time in minutes.

Feedback and followups no less than every other day until the problem gets fixed.

6

I should add i have a 2 hour response becasuse its only me and allows me to go for lunch or pop out of the office for meetings that last a hour and then still meet the SLAs.

7

At my previous employer we had SLAs to set the expectations to a proper amount of time. My current employer does not have SLAs and I don’t think that they will be coming any time soon. I really like the SLA for internal because then you can measure everyones expectations and gauge how well you are performing against them.

Thank you for continuing your support of the Spiceworks Community.

Dave

8

We’ve tried, but we’re not just a dedicated IT shop. We jump between IT and product application support constantly which shoots holes in trying to do anything consistently, since we’re constantly dealing with customer issues.

9

I try to set up an expectation for a fix within 48 hours.

Then when I get it fixed in 45 minutes, I look like a god.

It helped to watch Scotty on Star Trek in action all those years ago.

1 Spice up
10

4 hours for first response, but only because we have one “help desk coordinator” who is also our only technician. Given he may already be at a different site when a call/ticket comes in we thought it was reasonable to at a bare minimum check the tickets 1st thing in morning, again around lunch, and last thing before he leaves.

11

No SLA here either. I work for a smaller firm with under 100 users all in one location including a dozen or so remote users. I’m the only IT here, no need for SLA for one person turn around. My bosses are always flexible when it comes down to projects as well as my hours operation, work from home etc.

Within the two years since I started i had a variety of large projects and got my environment almost where I wanted it to be. I do prioritize a lot though, Global and Server issues are always the first ones to be addresses, the rest are Desktop Support issues. In case that I get two cals at the same time one from the CEO and the other one from a ne employee, CEO obviously gets my attention first :slight_smile:

The one thing that I wish to be addressed is to stop people from constantly paging me on the intercomm…

In the beginning it was a mess, but I got it straightened out. Not sure if I ever would want to work for a larger organization, I love my freedom here :slight_smile:

12

I am a one man shop with about 100 employees at seven sites. I made SLA’s so that management and I would be on the same page. High priority tickets get done ASAP, medium priority get done on an average of 10 hours, low priority within 3 days. This assumes no major projects are taking too much of my time. While I don’ think this has helped or hurt my relationship with employees it has

definitely helped management understand what one tech can do in this environment.