Transferring time recorded against SLAs between projects

[Chris Bickley]

We have an Incident project and a Problem project.

Time to First Response and Time to Recovery are recorded against Incident.

If an Incident requires a software fix, a Problem is created from the Incident.

Time to Resolution is recorded against Problem and currently starts from zero at the point the Problem is created.

What I would like is to transfer the time spent on the Incident up to that point across to the Problem, so that Time to Resolution includes the time spent on the Incident to date - is there a way of achieving this, please?

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chris Bickley and welcome to the Community!

No, not as far as I can think of. Also, while I understand where your request is coming from, it might not be fair to try and do this.

Assuming that your overall plan would be to get problems resolved in - just as an example - 3 business days and 2 teams need to work together, it would not be very fair (and potentially stressful) to the downstream team to be held responsible for the time that might get lost by the first team that does the intake. If you expect the first team to hand over a the issue within e.g. 1 day and they hold it back for 2,5 days, that would suddenly impact the downstream's team to only have 4 hours left to fix the problem, while they were not even involved earlier. That would then make it very unlikely for them to come up with a solution in time.

I have dealt with this type of problems in the past by splitting the total SLA time across separate targets per team across the value stream. e.g. the first team gets 1 day to try and resolve the issue. If they can't, they need to pass on the issue when the SLA timer runs out. The second team gets an SLA target of 2 days, regardless of what happened before. If the initial team escalated the issue earlier, resolving the issue within 2 days is just good for the requestor, since the issue gets resolved faster than necessary. If the initial team escalated to late, at least the second team doesn't get punished for things that are not under their control.

It is always possible to have SLA timers per team and a third one that runs separately as a resolution time SLA on the original ticket as well, so you can also track overall resolution times across both teams.

Hope this helps!

[Chris Bickley]

Thanks @Walter Buggenhout - that is helpful.

I take your point about the scenario whereby the initial team has used up virtually all of the available time, making it unfair on the second team; indeed, I remember us discussing this when we first designed the workflows.

I did wonder about continuing tracking the time on the original Incident by having the Time to Resolution there, so that may be the route we choose to go down - notwithstanding that it still doesn't address the possible "unfairness" scenario you describe.

Thanks again