A service level management process ensures that all IT services delivered to customers meet agreed-upon standards of quality. It involves ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are in place, being met and that service levels are monitored and reported on.
In order to accomplish this, it is crucial to have the necessary tools in place. Often, the processes and systems that define service levels are outsourced to third-party companies. It is therefore essential to know how you can best manage them in the context of your own SLM processes.
The first step in setting up a SLM process is determining what services are crucial to the business and establishing a reasonable set of measures of success. This typically involves analyzing factors such as efficiency as well as user base and design aspects. It is also essential to select your technology expertise with care – for example, a company that specialises on a specific platform might be able to guarantee higher levels of performance than a generalized service provider.
Once the SLA goals are established then teams need to devise a plan to maintain them. This will usually involve the establishment of systems that can track progress and alert the team when there are issues in achieving goals.
A robust SLM procedure also includes continual improvement processes. These will enable teams to gain insight from the metrics they track, and discover ways of improving the processes that cause them problems. For example, if a NOC service is frequently not meeting its SLA to answer phone calls within 30 seconds it should be possible to identify the reasons for this, and fix it.
