Defining agreements

After a successful negotiation with department managers or customers, you have the information necessary to begin defining your agreements. Plan by first listing agreements that you want to create. If each department or customer you support has similar service requirements, you could consider planning all the service levels for one department at a time. To define your agreements, you should consider the following items:

• Create a table or spreadsheet that shows an example of an agreement-naming convention.
• List and categorize all your negotiated agreements. Use a naming convention that accurately identifies and categorizes each of your agreements.
• Define the function of the agreement.

After the negotiated agreements are defined, you record the agreements in the Agreements Console. When you create these agreements, you must define and set up the overall goals that measure whether the agreement was met or missed. You can also set penalties and rewards for meeting or exceeding the goal and milestones and actions that are triggered based on your goal.

See the following sections for more information.

To create an agreement

1. Log on to the Service Level Management Console.
2. In the navigation pane, select the folder in which you want your agreement to reside.
3. On the Agreements tab, click Create to begin defining your agreement.
4. In the Agreements form, select an Agreement Type.
5. Enter a title for the agreement.
   Do not include any parentheses in the agreement title.
6. (Optional) Enter a description for the agreement.
7. In the Expiration Date field, enter the date and time that the agreement expires.
8. In the Notification Date field, enter the date and time that you want a notification to be sent about an upcoming expiration.
9. Select the Status of the agreement.
10. Enter the names of the reviewers who will review the agreement, or select from the list if your administrator has configured the names.
11. (Optional) In the Business Service field, select a business service.

You can also enter the name of the business service. After you enter the first three characters, a list of matching business services are displayed, from which you can select the required service.

All service targets related to the agreement inherit the business service and include it in the Terms and Conditions. The service target, therefore only attaches to a change or incident request with that same business service.
An agreement can have only one business service setting, but a business service can be related to more than one agreement. The service target can attach to multiple agreements, each with a different business service. The multiple business services are included in the Terms and Conditions.
For example:

To build an agreement

Building the agreement creates the workflow, such as for the milestone actions.

You can build an agreement when you save the agreement, or you can build it later by selecting the agreement and clicking Build in either the Agreement tab or the Administration tab (if you have the correct permissions).

To modify an agreement

You can use the modify feature to update expired agreements.

1. Select the agreement that you want to modify.
2. Click View.
3. Make your changes and click Save.

To delete an agreement

The following diagram shows the process of a service termination in service level management:

If the task requests the termination of one or more SLAs, the service level administrator updates the SLA information in the service level management application to ensure that the Service Level Targets (SLTs) are no longer monitored. In addition, the service level administrator indicates the SLAs that they have been discontinued on a signed hard copy. Finally, the service level administrator checks whether there are any active SLAs left for the service for which the SLA(s) are discontinued. If there are no more active SLAs left for this service, the service level administrator also discontinues the service by updating its status in the service management application.

When you delete an agreement, all its associations are deleted. However, the review periods, service targets, penalties, attachments, contracts, and compliance data are retained. You can access the data by looking at the appropriate form, such as the SLM:Measurement form or in reports. The status of any related data is set to Inactive. 

Information relating to deleted agreements is still included in reports if the date range supplied for the report contains current calculated data.

1. Select the service target you want to delete.
2. Click Delete.
3. In the Confirm Operation dialog box, click Yes.

Details are saved to a log file SLMInstallDir \Program Files\AR System\AR Server\Db\SLMDelete.log.