SLA policies — what they do and how to write one

SLA policies

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) policy is the rule that decides:

1. How quickly a ticket needs a first response
2. How quickly it needs to be resolved
3. Which calendar (working hours) the clock runs on
4. When the system should warn an agent that the deadline is approaching

Every ticket gets one — and only one — SLA policy applied to it.

How matching works

When a ticket is created (or its key fields change), the system walks through your SLA policies in order (lowest number first) and picks the first one whose criteria match. If no targeted policy fits, the default catch-all policy applies.

A policy’s match criteria can include:

• Department — only applies to tickets in IT, Estates, HR, etc.
• Priority — only applies when the ticket is at this priority (or one of these)
• Source — only matches tickets raised via portal, email, phone, etc.
• School — narrow to a single academy

Leaving a criterion blank means any value matches.

Per-priority targets

A single policy can carry different response & resolution times for each priority. An “IT — incidents” policy might say:

Priority	Respond in	Resolve in
Urgent	15 min	4 h
High	1 h	8 h
Medium	4 h	24 h
Low	1 day	3 days

You set these in the Targets tab when editing a policy. Any priority you leave blank falls back to the policy default (the simple Response/Resolution pair below the table).

If you want to use the same numbers across all priorities, just fill in the policy default and leave the per-priority table empty — the engine treats unset rows as “use the default.”

Pairing with a Priority Matrix

If your trust uses custom priority labels (e.g. P1 / P2 / P3 / P4 instead of Urgent / High / Medium / Low), pick the matching Priority matrix in the Targets tab. The matrix’s labels and colours then appear next to each row in the targets editor — you’re still keying by the four underlying priorities Tickets carry, but the editor reads in your trust’s nomenclature.

The Apply matrix defaults button pre-fills any blank rows with the matrix’s per-priority sla_hours value as the resolution target, and one-quarter of that as the response target.

The catch-all default

Every workspace ships with a default policy named Default policy. It applies to anything no other policy matches. You can rename it, retune it, point it at a different calendar — but you can’t delete it. If you do delete the flag (uncheck “default”), make sure another policy is flagged as default first, otherwise some tickets will fall through with no SLA cover.

Editing in the slide-over

Clicking any policy card opens an edit panel from the right with three tabs:

• Basics — name, description, and a sentence-builder preview that reads as plain English
• Targets — per-priority table, matrix picker, warning %, calendar
• When this applies — chip toggles for priority and source, dropdown for department

Use Sentences view (top-right toggle) to read all your policies as paragraphs at a glance — handy for “is this saying what I think it’s saying?” sanity checks before you change something.