Use priority to group SLAs (early access feature)

We’ve heard from many of our customers that they are repeatedly hitting SLA goal limits in Jira Service Management projects.

Enrolling in early access for Improved SLAs unlocks greater capacity for your SLA goals by creating efficiencies in the way we calculate goals for your project. Instead of increasing the goal limit, we are increasing the amount of time targets a single goal can handle, allowing you to reduce your dependency on the goal limit by a large magnitude. We’re only allowing for priority time targets to be grouped under a single goal right now.

The feature also includes some quality of life and user experience improvements to make managing and updating your SLAs easier. To see any changes or improvements to your goal configuration, you’ll need to review and edit your SLAs so your priorities are grouped under the relevant goals.

An example of how improved SLAs increases your goal capacity

Today, If you had High, Medium, and Low priorities, and the Service requests ticket category, you would need 3 goals total. This goal number also potentially multiplies every time you add another value to your JQL, such as Organization, Assignee, or a custom field value.

With improved SLAs, if you can take those High, Medium, and Low priorities and group them under a parent JQL expression "Ticket category = "Service requests" and this would be calculated as 1 goal. An All remaining priorities field is also present as a default value that catches any other priority values, including None. Each priority value under the parent JQL can be given a time target that is represented in the agent queue and issue view as normal.

At the current goal limit of 90, this new structure effectively gives you 90 * priority as your new capacity for time targets. For example, if you have 90 goals and 5 priorities, this would be 90 * 5 = 450 time targets.

How to sign up for improved SLAs

We’re running an extended early access program (EAP) as an opportunity to gather feedback and understand your needs relating to this feature. We would love to hear your feedback on this feature, and if it’s working well for you, we’d also understand what JQL values you would like to see grouped in the future.

Sign up for improved SLAs via this link.

Will improved SLAs affect my existing SLA configuration?

Improved SLAs is a feature aimed at improving the SLA configuration experience. When improved SLAs is enabled, it will not impact any your existing configuration such as goal time, JQL, or calendars. Issues will continue to be checked against the list from top to bottom. When you first look at your improved SLA goals, you’ll notice a new field is present under each goal: All matching priorities.

The All matching priorities field contains the calendar and time target values for the parent JQL expression. If you do not make any changes to a goal, this has no functional effect and your goal will continue to work as before.

How to group your SLAs by priority

You must be a project administrator or Jira administrator to edit or create an SLA. When you first add a priority to a goal, the All matching priorities field will change to All remaining priorities. This field will always be matched last within a list of priorities and will always match with issues based on the parent JQL expression after all other priorities have been checked.

1. From your service project, go to Project settings > SLAs. All existing SLAs are displayed here.

2. Navigate to an existing SLA and select Edit.

3. Select Add priority under a goal to add a priority.

4. Select the appropriate priority from the dropdown menu. Priorities in the dropdown menu are populated based on Jira settings. Learn more about configuring priorities.

5. Give your priority a time target and calendar value.

6. Repeat from step 3 to continue adding priorities to your goal.

Priority values added via the Add priority button act as an individually calculated AND statement to the parent JQL expression. To ensure configuration works as efficiently as possible, we recommend you review your SLA configurations so that you do not have goals with AND "Priority" = JQL expressions that create duplications.

How to turn off improved SLAs

To turn off the improved SLAs EAP, submit a support request using this link. Ensure you mention the projects you’d like the feature disabled on and our support team will help you turn off the feature and make any required updates to restore your SLAs configuration to the original UI and structure.