Configuring business hours and non-working days

This recipe will define the hours that your business offers services, which allows calculation of resolution and response times against SLAs.

Getting ready

For this recipe, it is required that you have already assessed the business hours that your IT services will offer to your organization, and that you have custom management packs in place to store your queue customizations.

How to do it...

The following steps will guide you through the process of configuring business hours and non-working days within Service Manager:

  1. Under Administration, expand Service Level Management and then click on Calendar.
  2. Under Tasks on the right-hand side of the screen, click on Create Calendar.
  3. Give the calendar a meaningful name; in this example, we have used Core Business Hours:

    How to do it...

  4. Choose the relevant time zone.
  5. Place a check mark against all the days for which you offer services.
  6. Under each working day, enter a start time and an end time in the 00:00:00 format, for example, 8 am should be entered as 08:00:00:

    How to do it...

  7. You can also specify the non-working days using the Holidays section; under the Holidays pane, click on Add.
  8. In the Add Holiday window that opens enter a name for the Holiday, for example, New Year's Day.
  9. Either manually enter the date in the format relevant for your regional settings (for example, for the United Kingdom regional settings, use DD/MM/YYYY) or use the visual calendar by clicking on the button to the right of the date entry textbox:

    How to do it...

  10. Click on OK for each holiday. Once all holidays have been added, click on OK to close the Create/Edit Calendar window.

How it works...

When you specify the business hours and non-working days, Service Manager will take these into consideration when calculating SLA metrics, such as resolution time and first response time for all work items that are affected by the calendar.

There's more...

A calendar on its own has no impact on service levels. The calendar is one part of the SLO configuration. The rest of this chapter provides additional recipes to complete the configuration.

Adding holidays in bulk

Adding holidays manually can be a very time consuming process. Our co-author Anders Asp has automated the process using PowerShell to import a list of holidays.

Note

You can download the script and read about the process on the TechNet Gallery at http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Generate-SCSMHolidaysCSVps1-a32722ce.

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