Establishing agreements

Agreements are planned by a service level manager and customer. The first thing you need to do while creating agreements is negotiation. The groups involved in the negotiations prepare information to clearly communicate their needs and responsibilities. Negotiations determine business rules and actions, such as prioritization, response and fixed times, performance targets, escalations, and notifications. Some of the considerations that might affect negotiations, while planning an agreement are as follows:

• Who or what is being supported?
• When is the service in effect?
• What will the service include?
• How are request urgencies defined?
• Is a 24-hour clock being used or are business hours defined? If business hours are used, what about holiday hours and business entities?
• Are all factors making up the agreement attainable? For example, what is the location of the customer in relation to the support technician? Are they located in the same building? If not, is travel time included? Are traffic and seasonal weather conditions addressed? Are there seasonal workload adjustments that need to be considered?
• Can you measure the expected level of service? Does the measure of service provide an accurate gauge of effectiveness? Are the SLAs renegotiable based on experience defined by metrics?

The following diagram indicates the process of establishing agreements for a service activation:

Consider the following three main areas when establishing agreements.

Establish relationships

A relationship needs to be established and nurtured between the service owner and the business relationship manager. The business relationship manager meets with business managers and business users to understand their needs. The outcome of the discussion with the business is an understanding of the services the business requires for the upcoming period and into the future.

Review services

Some of these services might already be established services that the IT organization provides. Some of the requested services might not yet exist. When reviewing services, do the following tasks:

• Review and define or validate required Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) or Underpinning Contracts (UCs). For those services that already exist, the business relationship manager verifies that valid (unexpired) OLAs and underpinning contracts are in place. The business relationship manager can also review past performance of the service's OLAs and UCs.
• If there is a new service that the business has requested, the business relationship manager should engage the IT service manager to establish the new service and commit to certain levels of service. These new OLAs or UCs are then defined.
• If IT or the external vendors do not agree to the changes, the business relationship manager re-engages with the business. They discuss the levels of service that can be delivered and work to gain consensus.
• Create or update the test or baseline OLA or UC. When all parties are in agreement on the type of service and the level of service, the baseline OLAs and UCs can be created and tested, if needed.

Create agreements

Many organizations want to create agreements for every service in their company. These companies end up overwhelmed by the amount of work needed to accomplish this task and end up frustrated when they cannot meet expectations. Successful implementations begin by identifying the top one or two major services or pain points and build service models around them. These topics should be considered when creating agreements:

• Service expectation level and responses to problems
• Escalation procedures
  Define the escalation procedures (milestones and actions) you'd like to take if the compliance target misses, is at risk, or falls below a specific percentage. These proactive milestones and actions allow you to prevent lagging performance over time. For example, if the compliance target is at risk, notify the SLA manager.
• Reusable policies
  Define a set of standard measurements, metrics and associated goals that can be applied over and over again to a large part of your environment. Create the terms and conditions of your workflow objects with reuse in mind.
• Identification of what to measure
  Make sure that agreements between service suppliers, service owners, and customers clearly document items that can be effectively monitored and measured. Metrics must be fully quantified and agreed upon by both parties. Subjective measurements should never be allowed. For example, some questions that your service level agreements should be able to answer include:** What is an acceptable response time for a high priority issue?
  • How quickly should a down service be restored?
  • What percent of time were my servers available?
  • What is the transaction throughput customers are receiving?
  • What tools are at your disposal to monitor customer issues? Can you run reports that show how quickly is your IT staff responding to customer's questions and problems? 

The following table shows a sample of requirements for a service desk service target:
Sample requirements for a service desk service target

Where to go from here

Identifying-employees-for-the-key-service-level-roles