OLAs with internal SLAs and child tickets

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Enterprise or higher, Support Enterprise
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An operational level agreement is an internal promise between teams. Child tickets are how you measure one properly.

The idea

Your customer sees one promise on the parent ticket. Underneath, each internal team that touches it has its own commitment, measured on its own ticket.

That separation is what lets you keep a customer promise while also holding an internal team to something realistic.

How to build it

  1. Turn on side conversations with child tickets.
  2. When work goes to another team, create a child ticket rather than an email.
  3. Write an SLA policy whose conditions match child tickets, using a form, a tag or the group.
  4. Set targets that team has agreed to.
  5. Add a trigger putting the parent on-hold while the child is open.

Why child tickets rather than group SLAs

Both work and they suit different shapes.

  • Group SLA when the ticket moves to another team and comes back. One ticket, several stages.
  • Child ticket when the other team's work is genuinely separate and can run alongside yours. Two pieces of work, two clocks.

Child tickets also give the other team their own queue, which matters when they are not a support team and do not live in your views.

The number to watch

How long children stay open. That is your internal handover time, and it is usually the largest single component of a slow resolution and the one nobody was measuring.

See also

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