4 SLA Reports Support Teams Can Make Using Custom Charts for Jira

In the latest release of Custom Charts for Jira, we introduced a new feature that provides better support for Service Level Agreement (SLA) data used in Jira Service Management (JSM) projects. Users can now choose SLAs in the Chart by and Group by dropdowns of charts, and can incorporate SLAs into calculations in Custom Charts. The ability to report on SLA data greatly benefits support teams, as they have quick access and easy insight into how they’re measuring up against their SLA goals.

In this article, we’ll discuss the different ways to use this new feature in Custom Charts to enhance reports for support teams.

Custom Charts Report 1: Average Time to First Response By Request Type

The Time to First Response SLA that comes with JSM projects measures how long it takes the team to provide a response to a request that comes into the customer portal. Teams can use Custom Charts to build a report representing the overall team average time to first response. In the example above, the average time to first response across the team is 10 days for most requests.

Seeing this broken down further by request type can help the team understand if this long response time is related to the type of request. It could be that the skills it takes to work on a specific kind of request are out of the team’s wheelhouse and we need to do some training, or hire additional staff with this skillset.

Either way, taking weeks to initially engage with a customer puts the relationship at risk and decreases trust in the services the team provides. Having the SLA information at their fingertips, the team can make decisions on steps to take to remedy the problem and better serve the customer.

Let’s take a look at how to configure Custom Charts for Jira to visualize this SLA data:

1. Add the Custom Charts for Jira gadget to your Jira dashboard
2. Once in edit mode, set the Source of the chart to be your JSM project
3. In the Chart by dropdown, find the system field Request type and select it
4. The default chart type in Custom Charts is a pie chart, but feel free to adjust your Chart type if you find a different chart is more fitting for your team (we’re using a 1D Table Chart above)
5. Adjust your Calculation settings
   1. In the dropdown that says Count, select the option Average
   2. In the dropdown that says Story points, select the option SLA time elapsed under the Common Fields section
   3. In the SLA dropdown that appears, choose Time to first response
6. Optional: give the chart a title
7. Optional: adjust the chart to display the average time to resolution in days instead of hours
   1. On the right side of the app, click the cog icon to access the chart display settings
   2. Scroll down to the General options section and find the Time unit dropdown. Select Days from the dropdown
8. Click the blue Save button in the bottom right of the app to add it to your dashboard.

Custom Charts Report 2: Time Remaining on an SLA by Assignee

For support teams, it’s extremely important to know which requests are about to breach an SLA so agents can take urgent action on them. After all, an SLA is a contract between the customer and support, so making sure you meet your time goals is not just about establishing customer trust but upholding the contract. Using Custom Charts, users can build out a report that shows how much time is remaining on an SLA for requests, broken down further by assignee. Breaking the chart down in this way gives individual agents quick access to the requests they’re responsible for so they can easily prioritize their work.

Let’s take a look at how to configure Custom Charts for Jira to visualize this SLA data:

1. Add Custom Charts for Jira gadget to your dashboard
2. Once in edit mode, set the Source of the chart to be your JSM project
3. For the Chart type, select the 2D Table Chart
4. In the Chart by dropdown, find the system field Key and select it
5. In the Group by dropdown, find the system field Assignee and select it
6. Adjust your Calculation settings
   1. In the dropdown that says Count, select the option Sum
   2. In the dropdown that says Story points, select the option SLA time remaining under the Common Fields section
   3. In the SLA dropdown that appears, choose a specific SLA
7. Optional: give the chart a title
8. Click the blue Save button in the bottom right of the app to add it to your dashboard.

Custom Charts Report 3: Average Time to Resolution by Assignee

Just like the Time to First Response SLA, the Time to Resolution SLA also comes with JSM projects. This SLA measures how long it takes the team to resolve requests that come into the portal. Using Custom Charts, we can report on the average time it takes for each assignee to resolve a customer request. Segmenting the chart in this way can provide the team with valuable information on productivity and efficiency. For example, if it’s taking Assignee A an average of 2 hours to resolve requests, while it’s taking Assignee B an average of 2 weeks to resolve requests, it could mean team workload is not balanced.

Let’s take a look at how to configure Custom Charts for Jira to visualize this SLA data ( Hint: It’s very similar to the first example in this article!):

1. Add Custom Charts for Jira gadget to your dashboard
2. Once in edit mode, set the Source of the chart to be your JSM project
3. In the Chart by dropdown, find the system field Request Type and select it
4. The default chart type in Custom Charts is a pie chart, but feel free to adjust your Chart type if you find a different chart is more fitting for your team (we’re using a bar chart above)
5. Adjust your Calculation settings
   1. In the dropdown that says Count, select the option Average
   2. In the dropdown that says Story points, select the option SLA time elapsed under the Common Fields section
   3. In the SLA dropdown that appears, choose Time to resolution
6. Optional: give the chart a title
7. Optional: adjust the chart to display the average time to resolution in days instead of hours
   1. On the right side of the app, click the cog icon to access the chart display settings
   2. Scroll down to the General options section and find the Time unit dropdown. Select Days from the dropdown
8. Click the blue Save button in the bottom right of the app to add it to your dashboard.

Custom Charts Report 4: SLA Breached vs Not Breached

In the Chart by settings in Custom Charts, selecting one of your SLAs from the dropdown automatically creates 2 chart segments: one for requests that have breached the SLA and one for requests that have not. This configuration gives teams a side-by-side comparison of overall SLA goal tracking metrics for that SLA. Having this information helps teams understand how they’re measuring up to the configured SLA goals. In the example above, we can see that over half of our issues have breached the Time to Resolution SLA, which may mean our customer relationships, and the health of the team, are at risk.

Let’s take a look at how to configure Custom Charts to visualize this SLA data:

1. Add the Custom Charts for Jira gadget to your dashboard
2. Once in edit mode, set the Source of the chart to be your JSM project
3. In the Chart by dropdown, begin typing the name of the specific SLA and select it
4. The default chart type in Custom Charts is a pie chart, but feel free to adjust your Chart type if you find a different chart is more fitting for your team
5. Optional: give the chart a title
6. Click the blue Save button in the bottom right of the app to add it to your dashboard.

Conclusion

Reporting on service-level agreements gives support teams more visibility into their customer relationships and a general sense of how the team is doing. Using Custom Charts, it’s easy to see, understand, and absorb this data quickly. Then you can use it to make improvements to your service performance.

It’s also important to remember that the reports above don’t necessarily give the whole picture. As mentioned in our last article, meeting your SLAs may not mean you’re resolving issues satisfactorily. You therefore need to monitor your customer satisfaction (CSAT) ratings alongside your SLA reports. Fortunately, you can make a lovely CSAT report with Custom Charts as well!

If you want to learn more about our features, including this SLA update, feel free to check out our documentation.