Glossary

Backlog

The volume of cases awaiting attention at a given moment. It is a flow indicator that anticipates deadline breaches before they occur and signals mismatches between demand and capacity.

The volume of cases awaiting attention at a given moment. It is a flow indicator that anticipates deadline breaches before they occur and signals mismatches between demand and capacity.

It anticipates the breach before it happens, which is what makes it valuable. A dashboard showing only breached SLAs reports the past; the backlog says how many will breach if nothing changes.

Related terms

Bottleneck

The point in a process where available capacity limits overall throughput, producing waiting and case build-up.

Predictive analytics

The use of trained models to anticipate an outcome before it occurs, such as a service level breach.

SLA

A committed and measured level of service, meaningful only when the commitment is calculated against real operations and can be explained.