Business Services in IMs and SRs
Peter_Miklian
Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
Hi,
maybe someone from Community/Cireson can answer, share their experiences or write best practices.
We just had discussions with our colleagues analysing and adjusting our business processes.
They say business services (BS) are the cornerstone of ITIL driven environment and want them mapped to each SR and IR for basic reports.
They asked why those crucial BSs are not presented on General IR tab and analyst had to switch to Related Items to see/add BS(s). Our question is: are we missing something or is our thinking correct it's just 'hidden'? In case of answer b. I hope there's an easy way to move this section to General tab by editing /customspace/. Maybe you could advice or our web developers can investigate.
Our SLOs are set for queues based on Priority which is just combination of Impact and Urgency. Our business analyst demand to take BS into account, too. SLA (Priority) to solve 'End-user computer BS' issue should be always higher than 'Core infrastructure hardware BS' etc. How could we achieve this? Should we generate separate queue for each BS (we have /60 of them)/BS group and bind SLAs to those queues? That would be lot of queues to maintain. Or maybe assign queues/generate SLOs by script looking into some table containing BSs/Impact/Urgency combinations? Thank you.
Best Answer
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Justin_Workman
Cireson Support Super IT Monkey ✭✭✭✭✭
@Peter_Miklian - You can definitely move the related business service picker from Related Items to the General tab. If you look in CiresonPortal/CustomSpace, you may have an Incident and/or ServiceRequest.js already. Here's an article on customizing the forms:
The SLO portion will be fairly complex. Priority is a calculated field but can be written independently of the Impact/Urgency. You might want to write a custom workflow or runbook that sets priority based on your own logic that incorporates Business Services. The only problem with that is that any adjustment to the Impact or Urgency while you're editing the form will overwrite the priority (portal or console). You could also have a piece of custom js in the portal that recalculates the priority each time the form is saved. I haven't tested any of that at all, and these are just the first ideas that come to mind, but I'd expect it to work if executed correctly. Maybe others are incorporating other factors into priority calculation and can speak to writing it independently of the Impact/Urgency?
1
Answers
To expand Peter on this so more people can understand:
Our IT governance team wants to map each service request and incident to a business service so they can start doing reporting like how many SRs / IRs of which business services were closed / completed / are overdue etc. for a certain timeframe.
We already have the issue solved on SRs through powershell script where business services are matched to SRs based on the contents oif a certain field (i think we set it up to be the text1 field). So if text1 in SR contains Mailbox , this gets mapped to our E-mail Business service, which is all fine and dandy, but we cannot really map this automatically to incidents as each incident is completely different and it's up to the users to choose the title , descripition of the incidents etc. So we cannot really pair these through a script. We had this idea where a user could choose his "Incident classification" and this would somehow be mapped to a business service, but our IT gov. guys didn't want to go through this way.
So we agreed that we might do a query input for the incident form in the portal so users will have to choose the business service associated with their incident. Which to me seems non-user friendly at all, since most of the guys filling out the incidents will have no clue / won't care and will just fill out the first choice there will be. So we as service desk (i personally work on SD atm) would have to check if these are correct and match it to the "appopriate" business service if not. That's fine i guess, but it's a bit time inefficient when you have to go through the related items tab and clickthrough like 5 different things. So we'd like to have this on the "first" tab - the general tab somehow in some other form where we would only go to a dropdown search for the business service and it would relate the business service to the incident.
I don't know if this is possible , or if anyone could advise us on how to better achieve mapping of business services to Incidents, but if any of you have any suggestions please let us know.
I really do believe there's a better way out there on how to relate these two together with better time efficiency on the Service Desk side and without bothering the user with a query, we probably just haven't figured out what the better way is :)
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As for the SLO question Peter was asking, we only currently have SLO's set up for incidents in general based only on priority. However, our IT gov. guys want to use the business service CI as a driving force for the SLO's and for each of these have a different SLO for a different priority. E.g Exchange busssines service CI related Incident with priority 3 would have a different SLO than a priority 5 or than another bussiness CI priority incident.
If we understand correctly, do we need to create separate queues and have them set up in a way where the criteria are (examples):
Queue1 SLO: Incident is related to Exchange Bussines service CI and Incident Priority = 1
Queue2 SLO: Incident is related to Exchange Bussines service CI and Incident Priority = 2
Queue3 SLO: Incident is related to Exchange Bussines service CI and Incident Priority = 3
...
Queuexy SLO: Incident is related to VmWare Bussines service CI and Incident Priority = 1
Queuexyz SLO: Incident is related to VmWare Bussines service CI and Incident Priority = 2
etc...?
Sorry for this being a wall of text , just wanted to make sure everyone gets what we're trying to accomplish 😊
@Peter_Miklian - You can definitely move the related business service picker from Related Items to the General tab. If you look in CiresonPortal/CustomSpace, you may have an Incident and/or ServiceRequest.js already. Here's an article on customizing the forms:
The SLO portion will be fairly complex. Priority is a calculated field but can be written independently of the Impact/Urgency. You might want to write a custom workflow or runbook that sets priority based on your own logic that incorporates Business Services. The only problem with that is that any adjustment to the Impact or Urgency while you're editing the form will overwrite the priority (portal or console). You could also have a piece of custom js in the portal that recalculates the priority each time the form is saved. I haven't tested any of that at all, and these are just the first ideas that come to mind, but I'd expect it to work if executed correctly. Maybe others are incorporating other factors into priority calculation and can speak to writing it independently of the Impact/Urgency?
@Justin_Workman thank you for your comment.
I already read that post about page layout modifications, just wanted to be sure this is it as I'm not web developer :)
About SLOs: yes, I was thinking of this in similar way.
We can use Orchestrator to monitor SR changes and each time Priority changes catch it and 'repair' running some script doing calculation of other attributes than Impact/Urgency (e.g. BS).
This is what I expected, real life examples from other users doing custom Priority calculations, thanks and I hope I will see some more comments :)