This documentation supports the 21.3 version of BMC Service Level Management.To view an earlier version, select the version from the Product version menu.

Evaluating service expectations

Business executives and owners have high expectations of the business services they offer to their customers. These business services must provide enough value at a fair price to enable the company to grow and be profitable. For each business service, there are an interrelated set of expectations between business owners, service suppliers, and the users of the service. The person in the business relationship manager role is responsible for gathering user expectations in context with the objectives of the business, and then working with the service owner and supplier manager to package a service offering that meets these expectations. Business services can be exclusively provided to internal users, exclusively to external users, or to a mix of internal and external users. For most internal business services, the business relationship manager can belong to someone residing within the IT department. For external facing business services, the business relationship manager role is normally one or more individuals within the sales or marketing department.

Related topic

Planning-to-implement-BMC-Service-Level-Management

When all parties agree to the requirements of a service offering, a method of accurately measuring success must be designed and implemented to ensure expectations are met.

User expectations must be translated into acceptable terms that are understood by the users and deliverable by the service suppliers. Measuring service expectations is critical because if the service supplier is unable to meet the user's expectation, the users can choose another service supplier. It is vital for the service provider to satisfy the user's needs or attempt to reset the expectation to a more reasonable level.

User expectations of a business service can be used to describe the characteristics of a service offering. These characteristics are normally expressed in terms of compliance over a given period of time and shouldn't necessarily focus on the individual actions a user might perform. Compliance could be expressed in a number of ways including:

  • 99% uptime over the course of a normal business day
  • No more than 2 service outages per week
  • A support person responds to you within 4 hours 98% of the time over the period of a month
  • 99.5% of the time, this website allows you to check your credit score in under 60 seconds

Each of the compliance statements define what the user community expects out of the service and not what the service supplier does to satisfy the expectation.

For each of your critical business services, define a set of user expectations in terms of a compliance statement that both your service suppliers, which can be your IT department, and your users can understand.

User expectations might include:

  • Users are able to log onto the website within 15 seconds.
  • User search and queries are completed within 30 seconds.
  • User money transactions are completed within 30 seconds.
  • User requests are responded to based on their priority. For example:
    • Critical requests - within 30 minutes
    • Important requests - within 2 hours
    • Normal requests - within 4 hours 

Service support expectations might include:

  • Business service issues are responded and resolved based on their priority. For example:
    • Critical incidents - 15 minute response and 1 hour resolution
    • High incidents - 1 hour response and 4 hour resolution
    • Medium incidents - 4 hour response and 24 hour resolution
    • Low incidents - 8 hour response and 48 hour resolution 
  • Similar to incidents, change requests are scheduled and completed based on their priority.

Where to go from here

Defining-a-service-catalog

 

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