A process to manage service levels ensures that all IT services delivered to customers meet agreed-upon levels of quality. It is about making sure that Service Level Agreements are in place and being fulfilled, assessing and reporting on service levels, and constantly striving to increase the quality of service over time.
It is essential to have the right tools in place to achieve all of this. Most often, the systems and processes used to determine service levels are outsourced to third party. It is therefore essential to know how you can best manage them within the context of your own SLM processes.
The first step to set up an SLM process is identifying what services are crucial to the company and establishing a reasonable set of measures of success. This will often include considering aspects like efficiency as well as user base and design aspects. It is also important to choose technology expertise carefully For instance a company that is specialised in a particular platform may be able of committing to higher levels of performance than a generalised service provider.
Once the SLA targets are set and the team has to develop an action plan to meet them. This usually involves setting up systems that track progress, and notify the team when there are issues in achieving goals.
Furthermore, a strong SLM procedure will include continuous improvement processes. They will allow teams to gain insight from the metrics they track, and discover ways of improving the processes that are causing problems. For instance, if an NOC service is often not able to meet its SLA for answering phone calls within 30 seconds It should be possible to pinpoint the reason for the reason why this is happening and fix it.