Our central helpdesk, the library helpdesk, and many of the distributed areas the track most of their work in ITSM (not all do) get calls for "help" all the time when nothing is broken. Those calls are _supposed_ to be recorded as User Service Requests, although the default for a new Incident is User Service Restoration and it does not always get changed.
When we configured ITSM 7 with SLM 7 for production in early 2008, and Kinetic Request for the customer interface, we made a lot of decisions about Service Type. Some of that is detailed in our docs on http://remedy.unt.edu (support staff docs are at http://arsweb4.ars.unt.edu/index_prod.htm ), mostly under the SLM and Outages sections. The rates of escalation for Infrastructure Restoration, User Service Restoration, and User Service Request are very different - the resolution of a Critical Infrastructure Restoration breaches in 4 hours versus a Low User Restoration breaches in 32 hours. A low User Service Request also breaches at 32 hours, but we could have set that to an even longer period. Restorations are fixing broken stuff. Requests are not; they are things people need or want to have done that they did not have access to or running before. Anything like a "question" called into the helpdesk will normally be classified as a User Service Request, including password resets, unless the discussion leads to an actual issue like a mail or distance education service being down. BTW, all or most of our Kinetic Request Service Items available to our customers explicitly set the Service Type (and Severity/Impact/Urgency/Priority), which is very helpful since all of the SLAs key off Service Type and Priority. If you look at our docs, Severity is a metric we added since we had used it since 1999 in Help Desk 4 and later 5.5 and it allows our staff to ignore Impact, Urgency, and Priority when entering tickets. We use Infrastructure Events for scheduled maintenance and scheduled outages, but this may be a non-standard use since I think it was intended for use with monitoring tools that we do not have integrated to ITSM (and there are no central monitoring tools on campus - everyone uses whatever they found on the Internet yesterday that looked cool, it seems). We also don't have Asset Mgmt, so there are no CIs and no down-time records other than what we carry in Kinetic Calendar. Just some thoughts since I didn't see much response to your query. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arsl...@arslist.org] On Behalf Of Ron Legters Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 11:28 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: How-to questions - Request or Restoration? Our shop is using Incident Management 7, and we're currently encouraging our IS staff to make better choices in the 'Service Type' field (specifically 'User Service Restoration' vs. 'User Service Request') so we can get more reliable numbers for Mean Time to Repair. We get a fair number of user who contact IS because they don't know how to do something, and we can't decide if we should class these as 'Requests' or 'Restorations'. On the one hand, the service is operating normally, there's nothing we need to fix on our end, so it sounds like a 'Request'. On the other hand, the 'Service Restoration' definition just specifies, in essence, that the service is unavailable, so if we make it available again either by repairing something or showing the user how to use it, it's still a Restoration. I'd be interested to hear how other folks are addressing this, as it seems unlikely we're the only shop that gets calls from users asking for help when nothing's broken. Thanks, Ron Legters Tools Administrator Production and Quality Control Univar USA Inc. 425.889.3952 Office 425.889.4111 Fax www.univarusa.com _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor:rmisoluti...@verizon.net ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor:rmisoluti...@verizon.net ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
