Service Level Management
Practical Case
The management of "Cater Matters" has decided to implement Service Level Management adapting the ITIL principles and recommendations to the needs of its organisation.
To carry out this task as efficiently as possible, a series of initial actions have been defined. These are basically:
- Appointing someone to manage the process.
- Drawing up a catalogue of services.
- Developing a comprehensive service quality plan.
- Defining templates from which to create SLAs associated with the main services.
Service Level Manager
The management has appointed one of its more experienced executives accustomed to dealing with customer relations to take the role of Service Level Manager.
His main function is to negotiate and agree on service delivery with customers, as the representative of "Cater Matters".
His specific responsibilities include:
- Preparing and maintaining an up-to-date catalogue of the services offered by "Cater Matters".
- Determining the general structure of the SLAs, OLAs and UCs.
- Negotiating SLAs, OLAs and UCs with customers and suppliers
- Supervising fulfillment of the service delivery agreements with customers and suppliers.
- Keeping the top management and IT organisation informed about the performance of the process.
- Defining the service improvement plans resolving deficiencies in the quality of the services delivered and/or adapting these services to new customer needs and the latest technological advances.
- Interacting with other IT processes to ensure that they all receive and contribution the necessary information for the optimal functioning of the organisation.
Drawing up the Service Catalogue
"Cater Matters" decided to subdivide its service catalogue according to the different types of customer contracting its services.
- Private individuals.
- Small businesses.
- Large corporations and institutions and public bodies.
The purpose of the catalogue is not just to publicise the various services but also to show (potential) customers clearly what the differences are between the options available on top of the basic service.
To do this, an online catalogue is developed allowing different versions to be compared and giving an initial estimate of costs based on the different options selected.
The description of each service includes additional information about:
- Delivery times.
- Availability of the service (holidays, night hours, etc.)
- Auxiliary services.
- Associated WebServices.
- Applicable legislation.
- Loyalty programmes.
- Online support.
Service Quality Plan
To ensure the quality of the service a SQP is developed, which defines:
- The responsibility of each of the departments in the service delivery process.
- Contingency plans in the event of serious deterioration of the quality of service.
- Key indicators of performance and customer satisfaction.
- Methods of supervision and real-time monitoring of the processes involved in delivering the service, such as, for example, deliveries and supplying the goods.
- Protocols for the Service Desk's interaction with customers and users.
- The levels of security, availability, capacity and redundancy necessary to ensure the correct provision of the service in cooperation with the people in charge of these processes.
Prototype SLAs
In order to avoid the task of preparing SLAs becoming too complex and tedious, templates are drawn up for different types of service and customer.
Each prototype SLA includes:
- General, non-technical description of the services agreed.
- People responsible for the agreement on both the customer's and the supplier's side.
- Deadlines for delivery of the service.
- Duration of the agreement and conditions for its renewal and/or cancellation.
- Conditions of availability of the service.
- Support and maintenance work associated.
- Response times.
- Recovery times in the event of incidents.
- Contingency plans if applicable.
- Charging and collection methods.
- Criteria for evaluating the quality of the service.
