The process responsible for monitoring, managing, and negotiating service level agreements, which assure service consumers of delivery of the service level requested, is referred to as service level management.
Aims of Service Level Management
Aims vary from agreeing and documenting responsibilities and targets outlined by the service provider, to designing service level agreements. Ascertaining delivery of pending, complete, and current IT services to the intended clients help create achievable targets for all IT services.
There is also reviewing and addressing the level of IT service provided and tracking and improving customer satisfaction.
Importance of Service Level Management
Mitigating the cost of excess or insufficient supplies and allocating roles and responsibilities among all IT services is essential in SLM. The definition of service levels helps in creating more accurate infrastructure.
Flexibility in business fosters better understanding between business units and IT services, setting realistic and attainable service quality goals, and discipline in supporting both internal and external sourcing of IT services.
The success of service level management is highly dependent on proper planning. Some steps to follow in planning include:
1. Data Collection
Successful data collection involves identifying and appointing a manager in the service level management who gets to spearhead the service's progress and implementation.
Team activities may entail creating a project plan based on the necessary changes. Analyzing the condition of the service being provided, and matching it against the current state. You also need to create an inventory for tools and software to be used in the project offers clarity to the team.
Finally there is creating a detailed budget on capacity management work and performing a gap analysis to reveal weaknesses in areas that require improvement helps avoid future losses.
2. Plan Creation
This step should set aside enough time for the training of the team involved in the work process. It is important to indicate where the service level manager should be placed and authority above him.
Building a budget that outlines the costs needed to sustain the service providers shows transparency and accountability. Stipulate the three components of capacity management — people, processes, and tools. Lastly, describe the workflow and include the work process, data inputs, and information outputs.
Before moving on to the next step, if the service level manager is content with the data gathered, the plan, and the budget created, he should proceed to submit them to the rest of the company through the internal corporate communications team for approval.
3. Plan Execution
Once approved, the next step is actualization, and it follows a series of steps:
- Appoint and assign the staff.
- Document the process. This is what is used as a guideline for the rest of the project.
- Obtain the tools needed for implementation.
- Build a service catalog for the sake of inventory.
- Create, negotiate, and implement service level
- Outsource and include services needed but are not provided by IT services.
- Create training materials based on the first two steps and execute the training plan.
- Implement reporting of the ongoing processes.
4. Initiate the Ongoing Work of Service Level Management
This step allows the company to stay engaged and informed on all the ongoing processes. It is advisable to include the ability to automatically alert the team when a project is in danger of failing to meet performance targets.
Schedule meetings to review the progress and performance results.
5. Post Implementation
Once the task is done, the post-implementation step is assigned 6 -12 months to gauge its performance. The success of the audit during this period determines its application.
Getting good service level management for any business is vital in the firm's success as a whole. It is arguably an essential set of processes within the IT infrastructure library. Also, feel free to contact us for the best service level management.
