Sage Developers - Establishing a Business Impact when troubleshooting Developer Support issues

Summary

The following information should be used as a guide to help establish the true impact that an issue has on a customer. Whilst not exhaustive, this should allow you to accurately assess the urgency of the problem.

Description

Please note that in the absence of a business impact, any issues logged with Developer Services will be assigned a priority level based solely on the information available. This may result in an inaccurate priority level being assigned to the case. In this case, a business impact should be obtained as per this guide.

Resolution

What is Business Impact Analysis?

Analysing the Business Impact should identify the operational and financial effects resulting from the disruption of business functions and processes. This could include:

Lost sales and income
Delayed sales (Customer dissatisfaction or defection, cashflow)
Staff utilisation resulting in delayed or additional processing (increased expense from overtime or additional staffing levels)
Regulatory fines
Contractual penalties or loss of contractual bonus
Delay to projects (implementations, upgrades, training etc)

Why is Business Impact important?

It is essential for new cases or cases left open, that the business impact is established. This applies to all queries raised through Case Manager to the Developer Services team.

The business impact is used to help in the planning and rescheduling of workloads and resources in order to resolve customer problems in a timely manner. This is done using 'priority levels' - the current priority levels and timescales are outlined at the bottom of this article.

To enable us to prioritise effectively, it is essential that you are able to provide a quantifiable Business Impact when logging a case through Case Management or via email.

Meaning of Quantification in Business Impact

Quantification is an important word in our dictionary. We need to know this from the lowest part of the problem to a summary of hours involved. Please provide a calculation where possible.

For example, there is an issue affecting the operation of a bespoke software routine on a customer site that adds in additional delivery details to a Sales Order and updates 3rd party applications, such as consigment information. To work around the issue, the customer has to perform extra steps outside of Sage on every sales order entered to submit information in place of the bespoke routine.

There are 4 operators entering sales orders for a full 7-hour working day.
Each operator inputs approximately 30 sales orders per day.
30 sales orders × 2 minutes = 60 extra minutes per person per day.
Four operators × 60 minutes = 240 minutes per day, or 4 hours.
In a working week, 5 days x 4 hours = 20 hours per week.

In this example, 4 staff members are affected and the problem is costing the company 20 hours per week.

Steps To Establish the Business Impact

Have all troubleshooting steps been investigated? (See below for guidance)
Can the routine in question still be run?
How many times a day is the routine run?
Are there any workarounds to the problem? If so, how much more time does the workaround add to the existing routine?
What is the quantification of the cause of the problem? (see the above example for details of quantification)
Are there any financial or legislative implications?

Troubleshooting Steps

Can the problem be recreated on demand? If so, ensure you have a list of steps available to send to Developer Services
Can the problem be recreated on site in Demo Data?
Can the problem be recreated off site?
Has the customer data been tested off site using the same version of the software?
Has the customer data been tested off site using the latest version of the software?
Is the problem PC specific? - How many PCs do they have/How many PCs are affected? – Are there any geographical implications? (i.e. all PCs on a site are affected which could inhibit potential workarounds).
Is the problem User specific? – How many users do they have/How many users are affected? – Are there any geographical implications? (i.e. all users in a particular office are affected which could inhibit potential workarounds).

Priority ratings and timescales

Priority	Descriptor	Priority is used for
High	Function Critical	Major functionality of Sage / bespoke is unusable or severely impaired. An upgrade or new site deployment date will be missed*
Medium	Limited Impact	Involves partial, non-critical loss of functionality of the software/bespoke. Some software/bespoke components are affected, but allow the user(s) to continue using the software. Users can reasonably work around such inconsistency or impairment.
Low	Cosmetic impact/ How do I?	General questions about using SDK / SDO / API functionality Issues which have no functional impact, but may affect users perception of Sage/Bespoke Can also refer to cosmetic issues, errors in the documentation, feature suggestions and requests for information. Any queries answered in our self-service options (website, help files, forum)

*The Developer / Business Partner should have made reasonable attempts to ensure their development and testing work is completed in a timely manner to avoid cases being raised with urgent deadlines.

Priority	Initial contact by Case Manager	Case Updates
High	Assigned to a technician within 1 working day	Updates will be provided within every 3 working days*
Medium	Assigned to a technician within 1 working day	Updates will be provided within every 5 working days
Low	Assigned to a technician within 1 working day	Updates will be provided within every 7 working days

*The Developer Services team will increase the level of urgency at our own discretion if sufficient business impact is supplied to support this request.

Sage Business Partners can now log new cases online!

If you're unable to find the help you require from our online resources, log a new case with us without having to use phone or email. Simply select 'Manage your cases' from the dashboard or visit my.sage.co.uk/cases.