Contract Life Cycle and Versioning

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Contract Life Cycle and Versioning

Once a Contract has been configured completely, it must be committed. This action allows the Calculation engine to begin calculating the service levels for all Metrics in the Contract. Committing the Contract changes its status from 'Preliminary' (where it is editable) to 'Effective' (where it is not editable). Any further changes required on this Contract require a new version of the Contract to be created. If the same effective dates are chosen for the new version, then after the changes are complete and the new version is committed, it completely overwrites the previous version. This also triggers the engine to recalculate the Metrics which are different to the previous version. Effective versions can also partially overlap, for example when a change is made to the targets of some Metrics in the Contract half-way through the effective dates. In this case, the old version is still used until the effective date of the second version becomes active. At this time, the second version assumes the effective status for the calculations.

The following table shows user changes against the recalculation impact scope and time frame. A change can impact a specific Metric within a contract-specific version or it can impact Metrics that are cross-contract and contract versions.


Change	Impact scope	Impact time frame
Changes Made in Metrics
Changing Metric details - business logic formula	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing Metric details - target value	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing Metric details - tracking period	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing Metric details - Metric parameters	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing Metric details - time zone	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From the beginning of the contract effective version
Changing Metric details - clustering	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing contract details -effective dates	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing contract details - timeslots	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing contract level parameters	Impact all Metrics within contract-specific version	From beginning of contract effective version
Changing SLALOM modules	Impact all Metrics attached to changed slalom module, in all contracts and contract versions	From beginning of contract effective version
General Operations
Changing Metric resource model / Change set (CA Business Service Insight 4.0)	Impact all Metrics that register resource, in all contracts and contract versions	From closest state before date in which change in resource occurred
Getting delayed events for the Metric Events with past timestamp (raw data or reusability events)	Impact all Metrics that use resource, in all contracts and contract versions	From closest state before date in which change in event occurred
Add Metric corrections data	Impact all Metrics that use resource, in all contracts and contract versions	From closest state before date in which change in correction occurred
Change, update or delete Metric exceptions time (activation & deactivation)	Depending on exception settings and specific implementation, impacts specific Metric within contract specific version or can impact Metrics that are cross-contract and contract versions	As close as possible to exception time
Custom attribute update	Impact all Metrics that register resource, in all contracts and contract versions	From closest state before date in which change in resource occurred

Finally, some key points to remember about Contract versions:

If the new version has the same effective date, only the Metrics that were changed are recalculated, and are recalculated from the beginning of the version.
If the new version has different dates, all the Metrics in the new version are calculated from the beginning of that version and all the Metrics in the previous version are recalculated from some point in that version until the new version becomes valid. The exact amount of recalculation depends on the configuration of states.
It is recommended to create contracts with effective dates for 1 year and renew them when they expire. This prevents recalculation periods longer than one year.
Not effective versions (the current date is past the end of the effective contract dates) of contracts are calculated (and hence still count as active Metrics in the system, since they have calculated service level data associated with them for reporting).

The values associated with global variables within Metrics are not carried between contract versions (that is, the OnLoad routine in the Business Logic is called at the beginning of each contract version).

Note: For a number of walk-through scenarios and case studies refer to Contract Modelling Case Studies.