Reuse service targets

The best way to simplify your service level management environment is to reuse service targets. Reusing service targets reduces the time needed to implement BMC Service Level Management (Service Level Management), and significantly lowers maintenance costs. The following Service Level Management features help you keep your number of service targets small but still support a complex business environment.

Reference goal times

Your service levels might require you to have different goal times on your service targets. For example, tickets submitted by a VIP might have a shorter goal time, or a test server might have a longer goal time than a production server. You can create different goal times on your service targets by using the workflow to set the goal time and by populating a field with the appropriate goal time based on other data on the form.

Reference business entities

Most organizations employ multiple support groups for the services that they offer. These groups have different business schedules based on different working hours, different geographical locations, and other factors. A common misconception is that different service targets are required to support these different groups. With Service Level Management, you can create service targets that can choose the appropriate business entity from the application form. This feature eliminates the need to create multiple copies of the same service target when the only difference is based on the group specified in the terms and conditions.

To illustrate, two support groups address service desktop application issues, DESKTOP-IRELAND, based in Dublin, Ireland, and DESKTOP-U.S, based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Each group has different working hours, but they have the same response time goals, which are based on the priority field on the service desk form.

An example of an inefficient way to implement this service target for High priority tickets is:

A better way to implement this service target is to get the Business Entity value from the form and to have a single service target for High priority tickets:

Managed Service Providers

Reusing service targets is especially important for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Without service target reuse, the service level management environment for MSPs quickly becomes unmanageable. To manage service targets, an MSP must consider the following recommendations:

• Provide a standard set of service targets to customers, and do not allow customers to create their own service targets. Allowing customers to create their own service targets results in a large number of service targets that are unique to each customer. As new customers are added who create their own service targets, the number of service targets quickly becomes unmanageable.
• Use the MSP feature in BMC SLM. The MSP feature enables you to reuse service targets between customers while maintaining segregation of customer data. For information about the MSP feature, see Managed-service-providers-for-a-multi-tenant-environment.