Service Level Management

Service level management (SLM) is one of the five components in the ITIL service delivery area. It is known as the most significant set of processes in the ITIL framework. The SLM processes provide a structure that defines services, and also defines which service levels are necessary to maintain the processes that were established by an organization.

The SLM is also used to develop the Service Level Agreement (SLAs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) in order to assure the agreements and costs of the services that are developed are satisfied.

The execution of SLM processes allows IT staff to more precisely and cost efficiently condition acknowledged levels of service to the organization. These processes make certain that the organization and IT are aware of their roles and tasks, as well as sanction the units within the organization.

When all is said and done the units of the organization are extenuating to the senior management level of service that is needed to sustain the business processes, not the IT. In addition to that the incorporated continuous improvement processes make certain that when the business needs to change the sustaining IT services will change along with them.

Service Level Management Activities

This is a very important aspect of SLM, the activities of Service Level Management include:

• Identifying organizational requirements by working with the organizational units.
• Establishing the scale of services, enduring, hours of function, resurgence aspects, and service performance.
• Translating organizational requirement into IT requirements
• Developing and maintaining a service directory, including costs for different tiers of service performance.
• Performing fissure scrutiny between the organizational requirements and the on hand services.
• Determining the expenses associated to services that service the goals suit production needs at a charge the organization can actually meet the expense of.
• Drafting, negotiating, and refinement of Service Level Agreements with the organizational units, ensuring business necessities are met, and concurrence from all parties concerned.
• The implementation of Service Level Agreements
• Measuring the performance of Service Level Agreements, reporting outcome, and adjusts what is need as essential.

Implementing Service Level Agreements

There are many immediate benefits that come from implementing the Service Level Management processes. These benefits include the following:

• It enables a more adequate understanding between your organizational units and IT.
• It helps with setting more accurate service quality expectations and effective measurements; it helps with monitoring and reporting the service quality.
• It also clearly delineates roles and responsibilities
• It provides the needed flexibility for the organization to react in a timely manner to changing market conditions.
• It helps to create a more precise infrastructure size based on the noticeably defining service levels.
• It allows the organization to avoid or moderate the costs of surplus or unsatisfactory capacity.
• Finally, it provides discipline in sustaining interior or exterior sourcing of the IT services.

An advantage to Service Level Management is that the SLM teams have close ties with to the organizations processes and the customer management, financial management for IT services, and capacity management.

So what does capacity management do? Well capacity management is used to provide data to the SLM team for SLA sizing. The Service level management then passes information pertaining to service gaps and/or interruptions back to the capacity management, so that it can be assessed for capacity and changes can be implemented.

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Service Level Agreements

Ten Points

By now you should have a pretty good understanding of the fact that Service level agreements are actually tools that are used to assure an organization delivers the level of service their customers expect. SLAs also help with setting those expectations.

So what is expected? Well these are ten of the things you might expect to see with a SLA:

A service description – This description details the key functions within the organization, it also provides information used to describe the service and its range, brunt, and main concern for the organization. It can also take account of participant details.

The service hours – These service hours record the hours that customers can anticipate the service to be accessible.

The service availability – The service availability is all about the targeted levels the IT organization will distribute within the established service hours.

The support levels – The support levels explain how to access the service desk, what hours the service desk is available, and also how to receive assistance after the service desk has closed.

The performance – The point of performance provides the anticipated response of the IT service, this can include the workstation response times, the details of the expected service, and the entry of objectionable service.

The functionality – The functionality sector is used to specifically detail what amount of errors are within a specific category, and how they can be tolerated before calling a breach of service.

The charges – The charges element plainly reveals any charging formulas or costs for the services performed.

The continuity – The issue of continuity refers to the continuity of operations development with references to the adversity improvement plan, specifying how the service will be provided and anticipated recovery time.

The security – The security point lists the procedures and the protocols that surround the security of information technology services; it also lists the measures that are needed to assure that security is intact.

The changes – The changes section is designed to list the organizational change in management policies, and the procedures, it can also be relied upon to instruct on how to properly follow such procedures.

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Service Level Management Process

After the Service level agreement is constructed the service level management process can then be used to carry out the agreement.

So what does the Service Level Management process involve? There are five stages to the service level management process, they are as follows:

Negotiation – This negotiating phase or stage is where the information technology services provided and the customer act as a team to establish service levels. These service levels should be SMART levels. SMART refers to Specific, Measurable, Agreed to, Realistic, and with in a Time frame. The said cooperation is unique because both parties work to refine it according to the present needs.

Finalizing – In the finalizing stage, the service level agreement is accomplished along with any other supporting and sustaining agreements.

Monitoring – With the monitoring stage, the service quality is measured by the service level agreement’s defined service targets. These service targets refer to the agreed-upon levels of service. Any variances need to have an action arrangement of how to correct and resolve them before the organization is unfavorably affected.

Reporting – In the stage of reporting, reports are generated that are used to balance the agreed-upon service levels with the baseline service levels. These reports are the foundation for persistent service enhancement.

Reviewing – In the final phase, the reviewing phase, an all-inclusive enterprise wide review of service value is provided. During this phase tribulations are brought into view for examination and instruction from the troubles and issues are shared and with any luck even learned from.