SLA Coverage Groups
In 4me®, service level managers have many options to define the coverage of service level agreements. This coverage can depend on several factors, such as the organization people are part of, the site where they work, or configuration items they use. If groups of people who cannot be determined this way should be covered by an SLA, these people can also be selected manually, by choosing the option ‘People Selected Below’. This can be hard to maintain, though, especially when the number of people with such a coverage is very high. Adding those people to a skill pool, and setting the coverage based on that, is also not always possible, as the number of people that can be part of a skill pool is limited. A new coverage option is now added in which people can be selected based on any filter that is available for person records: ‘People of the Following Coverage Groups’.
A new section has been added to the Settings console: ‘SLA Coverage Groups’. From here, using filters and optionally a search phrase, exact groups of people can be created for which there should be coverage via an SLA. In the example below, a coverage group of people who are marked as ‘VIP’ was created and linked to the ‘Gold Local Printing for Widget Data Center’ service level agreement.
In this same way, coverage groups can be defined for specialists, guests, people named ‘Zaphod’, or any other selection that is important for your organization.
SLA coverage groups are refreshed once per hour, so newly entered people may not be immediately covered. In the same way, removed people may still have coverage for a little while. Possibly this time can be decreased after a period of evaluation.