Gathering information

You begin the process of managing your service levels by collecting important information about your business, your customers, and how you plan to support their services. Sample questions for information gathering about business, customers, and services are in Identifying-business-needs.

Gathering information up front helps to facilitate a successful deployment that can grow with your organization. Failure to have an understanding of your business model can lead to false starts, resulting in reduced productivity, cost overruns, and general discontent by both management and customers.

Taking a top-down approach to defining and organizing your business services information means you are thinking about managing service levels in business terms and not in IT terms. To begin applying the top-down approach, gather the following information and make use of a spreadsheet or service catalog application to organize data in a way that can be easily understood, accessed, and updated.

The following steps are a guideline to help you assemble  information and should not be considered an exhaustive list. A fictitious company,Calbro Services, is used to illustrate how you might respond to each of the steps in Use case - Calbro Services top-down approach to service level management.

The following table shows the steps that are required to gather the service level management information: