A calendar on its own does nothing. It becomes useful in two places.
Calculating due dates
The Workflow Builder's SLA node works out a due date and writes it to a field. Point it at a calendar and it counts in working hours.
Four working hours from 4:00pm on a Friday, against a Monday-to-Friday 9:00–17:30 calendar, is 11:30 on the Monday — one hour on the Friday and three more on Monday morning. Measured as plain elapsed time it would be 8:00pm on the Friday, when nobody is there to do anything about it.
Omit the calendar and you get the second answer, which is rarely what a customer commitment means.
Measuring how long something took
ActiveManage can calculate the working time between two moments, which is the honest way to report responsiveness. A case raised at 4:45pm on Friday and resolved at 9:15am on Monday took 64 hours on the clock and 45 minutes of working time. The first number tells you almost nothing; the second tells you exactly how the team performed.
Practical advice
- Store the due date on the record. Recalculating it later gives a different answer if the calendar has since changed.
- Measure against the calendar the commitment was made under. Reporting a 24×7 service against a business-hours calendar flatters the figures considerably, and somebody will eventually notice.
- Agree what starts the clock — when it was raised, or when it was assigned — and make sure everyone means the same thing. This causes more arguments than the calendar ever will.
- Recalculate deliberately. If a priority change should move the due date, make that an explicit step and record that it happened.