Our SLA timers also depend on the priority of your issue or request. When you raise a ticket with us, we make an assessment based on the information you have given us.

We let you know the priority we have assigned, but are happy to take extenuating circumstances into account, if you think we’ve got it wrong.

Priority is based on two factors: severity and impact.

 

Severity

Roughly, this is how many people are affected by the incident, e.g.

• LOW – one person or small group of people affected
• MEDIUM – department or large group of people affected
• HIGH – whole organisation is affected

Impact

Again, roughly speaking, this relates to how disruptive the incident is, e.g.

• LOW – there’s an easy and effective workaround, so this is more an irritation than a stoppage
• MEDIUM – operational efficiency is degraded, but there is either a reasonable workaround or other members of the team are unimpeded
• HIGH – the issue is critical and one or more major business processes are stopped

We then apply our priority matrix as follows:

	HIGH Severity	MEDIUM Severity	LOW Severity
HIGH Impact	Priority 1	Priority 2	Priority 3
MEDIUM Impact	Priority 2	Priority 3	Priority 4
LOW Impact	Priority 3	Priority 4	Priority 5

In our experience most issues fall into priority 4, so that tends to be a default. The priority assigned dictates the amount of time we give ourselves to deal with your incident.

Priority Type	Respond Within…	Update Within…	Service Restore Within…	Goal %
Priority 1	1 hour	Bridge	6 hours	95%
Priority 2	1 hour	4 hours	8 hours	95%
Priority 3	1 hour	8 hours	16 hours	95%
Priority 4	2 hours	8 hours	16 hours	95%
Priority 5	8 hours	16 hours	40 hours	95%
Low Priority Admin	2 hours	8 hours	40 hours	95%
Paid Workshop Repairs	8 hours	16 hours	40 hours	95%

We calculate our Service Credits on the basis of downtime outside of the prearranged work period. What we mean by this is if a system is down outside of a prearranged piece of work then the following would apply:

Ticket Priority	Service Restore Within…	Total Downtime	Total Outside of SLA	Credit Due
Priority 1	6 hours	10.5 Hours	4.5 Hours	4.5 X Hourly Cost

To make this clearer, if we supported a system for you and we charged you £10 per hour, you would receive 4.5 X £10 = £45 in service credits against your next bill. The figures mentioned here are indiciative and you should refer to your account manager to understand the current prices you pay.

Although Requests and Project work have their own timescales, they are delivered with a Service Level Objective.

Incident = Something is broken, I need it fixed

Request = I need something but nothing is broken

Project = Lots of things that need to be done