Factors ruling the SLA Management

Service Level Agreement can be explained as an official commitment between a service provider and the customer. It is the key component of the SLM (Service Level Management) Strategy. It stands as a communication link between the two entities to build the expectation bridge. SLA functions as a mutual agreement between an organization and its customer’s expectations. It draws a clear outline for customers receiving services and suppliers providing them.

Service level agreements are also defined at different levels:

• Client-based SLA: Defined basis the customer requirement and needs.
• Service-based SLA: A generic SLA defined basis the services being delivered by the service provider. 
• Hierarchy- based SLA: Defined based on the hierarchical level of the customers for the same SLA and the same service.

Factors that drive for developing an SLA with customers are listed below: 

• New SLM strategy implemented by the IT organization
• New Technology/Product going live
• IT Services delivery concerns raised by customers 

Defining an SLA is a combined effort of many factors. Few major factors to be considered are: 

1. Service Description

2. Service Standards

3. Timespan 

4. Roles and responsibilities

5. Evaluation criteria

1. Service Description: 

Writing specific descriptions of your services leads to an affirmation to your customers that you know what they need. A very good practice is, creating a service catalog that provides a better picture of services that can be offered to clients easily. A catalog should contain all of the services that one can provide to its customers, including applications, infrastructure, and other business functions. A service catalog is a separate document that needs to be accessible to your customers.

As a practice in our organization, we provide a documented severity matrix as part of the SOW for approval. This matrix contains the severity level and description for various types of support request that we are adhered to provide to the customer. For example, a request such as ‘System Down. Application not accessible to all users’ is considered as high impact issue and needs immediate action. Whereas a request such as ‘System not accessible to a single user’ can be considered as medium impact issue and expected SLA may be between 1-2 working days.

2. Service standards: 

Next factor that needs to be defined is the Service Standard. This factor helps us set our organizations standards for our customers, which would include concepts like support availability, response and resolution times. For example, if our customer’s business hours for support is from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. CET as per the agreement, then we provide support to their business processes during the same time. 

Also, one needs to consider disaster recovery or emergency services that can be offered to the customers. Other standards such as response times and resolution times also need to be considered as services. The type of services or severity of a request may differ from business to business. 

3. Timespan: 

A start and end date of an SLA should be mentioned and communicated to the customers. The duration that is communicated needs to be explicitly declared against the service list and the type of service that we as an organization will cater to the customer.

For example, if a particular product support is to be provided for 18 months and the product license expires within 12 months then, the communicated SLA duration is not aligned as expected.

4. Roles and responsibilities: 

Assigning a contact person is one of the obligations that the organization and its client is responsible for. A well-aligned contact hierarchy with roles and responsibilities streamlined as per the process and customer needs is the key to managing your customer’s effectively and efficiently. 

A customer representative also plays a very important role in the purposes of discussing and negotiating the delivery of IT services. It is suggested that the customer representative should be from the organization. For example, an IT Head would be the right person to negotiate the project cost and define the scope of the project. Whereas, an IT executive will be the right person to understand the exact activities that are carried within the department to maintain required support supply for an organization.

5. Evaluation criteria: 

The best way to see your success is to measure it. So is the case with Service industry. An evaluation criteria, will determine how well your IT organization is performing. An important suggestion is to set the measuring criteria with the consent of your customers. You need to have appropriate tools to track the progress of the services offered to meet your customer’s expectations. 

A mutual goal agreement benefits you and your customer to determine how they will judge the service received rather than guesswork based solutions. Nowadays, customers are driven by meaningful and result oriented metrics. As a best practice in our organization, a status on a regular basis is shared with the customers on the services provided on monthly basis. Also, the expectation metrics is shared with the execution and delivery team to confirm their compliance towards the service delivery standards.

Conclusion: We should consider the evolving environment for service industry and set the SLA goals accordingly. Gaining customer consensus is one of the key criteria for a successful SLA management.

About Author:

Mrudula Palyekar is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, she actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. She can be contacted at:   mrudula.palyekar@spluspl.com