Service level management is the efforts to define and negotiate SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and then monitor and produce reports on delivery against the agreed level of service.
There are many activities that trigger SLM activity including:- New or changed services in Service Portfolio
- New or changed SLRs, SLAs, OLAs
- Change in strategy
- Complaints
Generally, before IT organisations make any commitments to SLA's they use score cards to measure internally their components based ability and capacity, to understand a little bit better where their instability and reliability lies. It's important for an organisation to be ready internally before they can fulfil any Service Level Agreement.
Before SLM kicks off, we need inputs from the Business Impact Analysis, the business requirements and information from the strategy, plans (including financial ones) and future requirements.
The other aspects of SLM include hammering out what those service breaks (interrupts, downtime etc.) mean for the customer. So if 100 users are affected for 10 minutes on a web application, you could call that criterion for a services break. You would implement that at the service desk. At the component level, this makes a lot of sense. Overall on the business side, we can take a look at services break criteria before we agree services time and build the SLA. The SLA's also include agreements between IT teams within the IT department.
During SLM we aim to measure operational services and their performance in a consistent and professional manner. We use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics to compare and evaluative efficiency and effectiveness of SLM activities.
Examples of KPIs- Percentage increase in customer satisfaction
- Percentage reduction in SLA targets missed
- Percentage of increased services covered by SLAs
- Percentage of SLAs needing renegotiation
At the end of SLM we provide:- Service Reports
- Service Improvement Plan (SIP)
- Service Quality Plan
- Documented templates
- SLAs
- SLRs
- OLAs
- Agreement Reports
See also:- Service Improvement Plan (SIP)
- Service Level Requirements (SLR)
- Service Based SLA
- Customer-based SLA
- Multi-level SLA
- SLM
- Key Performance Indicator KPI