A process of managing service levels ensures that all IT services provided to customers meet agreed-upon standards of quality. It involves ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are in place, are fulfilled and that service levels are tracked and reported on.
It is essential to have the correct tools in place for all of this. Ofttimes, the systems and processes used to define service levels are leased out to third party. It is essential to understand how to manage them within your own SLM process.
The first step in setting up an SLM process is to determine the services that are essential to the business and establishing a reasonable set of metrics for the success of the process. This includes factors like efficiency, user base and design aspects. It is important to select the expertise in technology and a firm that specializes in a particular platform may be able to commit to greater performance than a generalised service provider.
After the SLA goals have been established, teams need to establish a strategy to ensure they are met. This will usually involve creating systems to monitor the progress of the team, and then automatically notify the team when there are issues with achieving goals.
Furthermore, a strong SLM process will include continuous improvement procedures. They will allow teams to gain insight from the metrics they collect, and find ways to improve the processes that cause problems. If, for example, the NOC service consistently fails to meet its SLA of answering calls in 30 seconds, it’s likely to be possible to determine the root cause and correct it.
